ABSTRACT
Despite the considerable emphasis placed on the emotional and interpretative qualities of crime, cultural criminology also (very importantly) has the added advantage – because of its inherent engagement with culture (in all its range of meanings) – of ‘opening up’ questions of aetiology to include the wider social and cultural contexts in which all individual experience takes place. In this reconstruction of aetiology, cultural criminology arguably returns to the original concerns of mainstream criminology. However, for me, it returns with fresh eyes, offering new and exciting ways in which to reinvigorate the study of crime and deviance. As Ferrell and Sanders have commented, ‘bending or breaking the boundaries of criminology ... does not undermine contemporary criminology as much as it expands and enlivens it’ (1995: 17). Might cultural criminology then represent a possible way forward for criminology to reconcile many of its polarised theoretical positions? Specifically, could it help bridge the current divides between theories of crime that emphasise structural, ‘situational’ and environmental factors, and those that instead prioritise the actions and motivations of the ‘individual’ – two areas previously thought of as mutually exclusive, irretrievably antithetical?
