The Unconventional Methods of Cultural Criminology

This essay is about (a) the dilemmas of doing cultural criminology and (b) the importance of reading criminology through culture. Drawing from the author’s research, it presents three tropes of culture-work on crime (village, city street and media), attending to the implications of the observer’s documentary presence. While describing rules, logics and practices that compose the bundle of habits and inventions we call methods, I highlight the ways in which methods are differentially situated within hierarchies of knowledge production and dissemination. I argue that as we become participant observers and analysts in and of these contexts, we commonly transform the narratives we collect into data by linking them to maps in our logistics, epistemologies and rhetoric.