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Crit Crim (2013) 21:257271
DOI 10.1007/s10612-013-9186-3
Jeff Ferrell
Published online: 8 May 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract Cultural criminology focuses on situational, subcultural, and mediated constructions of meaning around issues of crime and crime control. In this sense cultural criminology is designed for critical engagement with the politics of meaning, and for critical intervention into those politics. Yet the broader enterprise of critical criminology engages with the politics of meaning as well; in confronting the power relations of justice and injustice, critical criminologists of all sorts investigate the social and cultural processes by which situations are dened, groups are categorized, and human consequences are understood. The divergence between cultural criminology and other critical criminologies, then, may be dened less by meaning than by the degree of methodological militancy with which meaning is pursued. In any case, this shared concern with the politics of meaning suggests a number of innovations and interventions that cultural criminologists and other critical criminologists might explore.
Over the rst two decades of its existence cultural criminology has been dened in various ways. Critics have dened cultural criminology by those aspects of the cultural that cultural criminological research puts into play, or by its alleged romanticization of criminals (OBrien 2005; Hall and Winlow 2007). Other critics have argued that cultural criminologys invitational edgeits ready inclusion of young scholars, alternative scholarship, and activismdenes it as inappropriate intellectual evangelism (Carlen 2011). Still others have dened cultural criminology by its alleged lack of denition, more a theoretical soup; (Spencer 2011: 198) or collection of individuals sharing some issues in common (Webber 2007: 140) than a fully developed criminological perspective. Cultural criminologists like myself have attempted to deector perhaps provokesuch criticism by refusing to dene cultural criminology on the grounds of open-ended anarchist
J. Ferrell (&)
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Texas Christian University (TCU), Box 298710, Ft. Worth, TX 76129, USAe-mail: [email protected]
J. Ferrell
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Cultural Criminology and the Politics of Meaning
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epistemology, or by similarly characterizing it only as a loose can[n]on or a loose
federation of outlaw intellectual critiques (Ferrell 2007:99, 2010).
As Ive reected on cultural criminologys maturation, the critiques of it, and the larger history and nature of critical criminological...