Cultural criminology

Cultural criminology is a theoretical, methodological and interventionist approach to understanding crime and its control that views criminality and the agents of its control as cultural products, i.e. as creative constructs enmeshed within processes of meaning-making. Attentive to the realities of a deeply unequal world, cultural criminology seeks to highlight how power effects the upwards and downwards construction of criminological phenomena: how rules are made, why they are broken and the deeper implications of such processes. One of the appeals of cultural criminology is that it often challenges existing, orthodox criminological approaches, which seek to ‘manage’ crime and criminals without asking fundamental questions about the nature of contemporary society. A central feature of cultural criminology is the way it analyses how power functions across different levels of society. Accordingly, rather than viewing power as existing solely as an abstract structure or as top-down state action/inaction, cultural criminology locates it within a range of seemingly mundane everyday experiences and momentary sensations.