Jeff Ferrell

Ethnography at the Edge: Crime, Deviance, and Field Research

In This Provocative Work, pioneering criminologists and sociologists vividly recount the personal and professional tribulations of conducting field research with deviant and criminal subcultures. The candid, first-person accounts of their experiences, especially in illegal, immoral, and dangerous situations, reveal the horrors, perils, and joys of ethnographic research. The methodological, theoretical, and political implications of field work are also thoroughly discussed. Describing their deep involvement with such diverse groups as skinheads, phone sex workers, drag dealers, graffiti artists, and the homeless, many of the authors confess to their own episodes of illegal drag use, drunk driving, weapons violations, assault at gunpoint, obstruction of justice, and arrest while engaged in ethnographic studies.Although field research is seldom safe, convenient, or above professional criticism, this volume demonstrates that it is vital for providing a fuller understanding of deviant and criminal populations.

Criminological verstehen: Inside the immediacy of crime

Many past and present studies in criminology have developed out of engaged and often illegal field research—that is, field research in which the researcher of necessity crosses over into the world of criminality. Contemporary reevaluations of methodology, and specifically the role of the researcher in the research process, provide a framework for exploring anew the implications of such field research. In addition, a variety of contemporary criminological studies highlight the importance of the meanings and emotions that emerge inside criminal events, and thus confirm the need for methodologies that can situate researchers to some degree inside illegality. Drawing on Webers notion of verstehen, this essay proposes one such situated methodology: criminological verstehen. It concludes by suggesting broader applications of this methodology in present and future criminal and criminal justice research situations.

Urban Graffiti: Crime, Control, and Resistance.

Recently, a new style of youthful graffiti has emerged in cities throughout the United States and beyond. Based on 4 years of fieldwork inside the Denver, Colorado graffiti underground, and on field and document research in other U.S. and European cities, this article explores the many ways in which those who produce this graffiti resist the increasing segregation and control of urban environments and shows how participants in the graffiti underground undermine the efforts of legal and political authorities to control them. Finally, it documents the ways in which this collective production of graffiti not only confronts and resists existing arrangements but constructs alternative social, cultural, and economic arrangements as well.

Boredom, Crime and Criminology

Under the dehumanizing conditions of modernism, boredom has come to pervade the experience of everyday life. This collective boredom has spawned not only moments of illicit excitement—that is, ephemeral crimes committed against boredom itself—but larger efflorescences of political and cultural rebellion. In the same way, the machinery of modern criminology has organized a vast collectivity of boredom buttressed by rationalized methodologies and analytic abstraction. Against this institutionalized boredom, cultural criminology offers a rebellion of its own, and with it the possibility of intellectual excitement by way of methodological innovation, momentary insight and human engagement.

Edgework, Media Practices, and the Elongation of Meaning: A Theoretical Ethnography of the Bridge Day Event

Edgework experiences have been subject to some discussion in recent literature. A form that finds a nexus between licit and illicit activities—BASE jumping—provides a fertile field for ethnographic and theoretical research. In criminology it provides insights into the sensual motivations and experiential frameworks for illicit social action in conjunction with moments of marginality and resistance. BASE jumping—the activity of illegally parachuting from bridges, buildings, antennas, and cliffs—increasingly incorporates a host of mediated practices. Our ethnographic research with the BASE-jumping subculture reveals that BASE jumpers regularly document their jumps through the use of helmet-mounted and body-mounted video cameras, or otherwise videotape one another in the act of jumping. These video documents in turn become a form of subculturally situated media as BASE jumpers utilize them to negotiate individual and collective status, to earn money and exposure, and to legitimate the subculture as sport. Moreover, mass media producers regularly create and disseminate their own images of BASE-jumping activities, and re-present subculturally generated images within television programs and films. The media saturation of BASE jumping thus serves to elongate and expand the meaning of an ephemeral event; to construct a multi-faceted audience for a seemingly secretive endeavor; and, ultimately, to render BASE jumping indistinguishable from the mediated representation of it.

It’s the image that matters: Style, substance and critical scholarship

Much has happened at Crime, Media, Culture since our last editorial at the beginning of Volume 2. As we launch Volume 3, we can report that CMC has recently been awarded a major international publishing prize and has continued, we hope, to promote the best in critical scholarship at the intersections of crime, media and culture. As is to be expected after two years, our Associate and International Editorial Boards have undergone some restructuring. While the changes to the latter are too numerous to list in detail here, we would like to extend our sincerest thanks to all the Editorial Board members who have worked with us over the past two volumes, and to offer a warm welcome to those new members who have come on board. It is also a pleasure to welcome Katja Franko Aas, Mark Hamm, Maggy Lee, Meda Chesney-Lind and Russell Smith as Associate Editors, and to confi rm that Alexandra Campbell and Majid Yar have joined us as Review Editors. In addition, we have created a new editorial position – Visual Arts Editor – which will be fi lled by Cecile Van de Voorde. Refl ecting our scholarly interest in the visual, we believe this new role will further cement CMC’s distinctive and innovative approach to visual issues. In this context it is the visual, and its signifi cance for explorations of crime, media and culture, that we wish to address briefl y in this editorial. Today, the visual constitutes perhaps the central medium through which the meanings and emotions of crime are captured and conveyed to audiences. Indeed, we would suggest that it is the visual that increasingly shapes our engagement with, and understanding of, key issues of crime, control and social order. The proliferation of news and entertainment media has generated growing competition for audience attention, a sort of infl ationary spiral of shock and enticement. Producing a visually arresting product which can ‘feed the mind and move the heart’, as Rupert Murdoch (2006) recently put it, has become one of the major challenges for media practitioners seeking to maintain their commercial buoyancy. In the midst of rapidly developing production technologies across a 24/7 mediascape, and multiplying screens and surfaces, the visual becomes paramount. However, while there is no escaping the ‘politics of representation’ (Hall, 1993), a scholarly engagement

Freight train graffiti: Subculture, crime, dislocation

In the widespread and growing hip hop graffiti underground, a new subcultural practice has recently become popular: the illegal painting of graffiti on outbound freight trains as a means of sending graffiti images out from their initial, circumscribed points of production into wider circulation. Using ethnographic methods appropriate to such a fluid, dislocated, and visually rich subject of study, I examine the proliferation of freight train graffiti, and the cultural and historical dynamics surrounding it. I also document the ways in which freight train graffiti both reproduces and expands long-standing orientations in the hip hop graffiti underground toward spatial mobility and symbolic expansion. Finally, I explore a variety of cultural and theoretical trajectories that freight train graffiti suggests: the development of criminal and deviant subcultures as dislocated symbolic communities; the interweaving of crime, cultural space, media, and audience; and the emergence of postmodern or anarchistic form...

Corking as community policing

Over the past couple of decades there has emerged a new generation of movements for social justice that in particular embrace ‘direct action’ and ‘do‐it‐yourself’ activism – that is, the replacing of traditional forms of social movement ‘protest’ or political agitation with the direct, immediate, and autonomous enactment of the movements alternative models for living. Among the more successful of these is Critical Mass, a global movement that ‘dis‐organizes’ collective bicycle rides as inclusive and environmentally appropriate alternatives to automotive transit. Within Critical Mass, the dismissal of institutionalized policing power and the embracing of do‐it‐yourself activism have spawned the practice of ‘corking,’ whereby a Critical Mass bicyclist breaks away from the collective ride and stops to block a crossing street as the mass of riders rolls through a traffic intersection. The distinctly ‘dis‐organized’ and culturally engaged dynamics of corking have in turn served to construct corking as an informal version of community policing – of policing both the transitory community of Critical Mass riders and the neighborhood communities through which the ride passes.

Borders breached, conventional claims questioned

Welcome to Volume 2 of Crime Media Culture: An International Journal. At a time when many of our geographical and cultural borders are ever more closely guarded, it seems apt to reflect on the intellectual and artistic borders breached and intersected across the pages of CMC. As the scholarship appearing in CMC suggests, these borders – most notably, but not exclusively, between criminology, media studies, and cultural studies – are often porous, and at times fully permeable. Indeed, this journal could scarcely exist otherwise. The diverse contributions to Volume 1 of CMC, we feel, clearly illustrated the high quality of academic research, intellectual debate, political commentary and artistic engagement that can result from a truly cross-disciplinary interrogation of crime, media and culture. We are pleased to report, then, that the eclectic, cross-cutting intellectual revolution we spoke of in our first editorial appears to be well under way. Despite this, though, we would suggest that meaningful and sustained analysis between and across disciplines remains an important and pressing challenge. Even the most cursory glance at publishing catalogues and university prospectuses reveals that mediaand culturally-oriented criminology is a rapidly expanding area. Yet how many criminologists possess the methodological and conceptual tools to adequately deconstruct a crime film? How many have the journalistic or literary training to untangle the complexities of popular crime writing? At the same time, while scholars working within the realms of media and cultural studies routinely speak of issues of crime, deviance and control, how many can claim the socio-political and historical understanding of crime and penality so central to the work of many criminologists? Answers to these questions suggest that while there is clearly a burgeoning body of work exploring the interrelations between crime, media, and culture, we have only begun the conversation; there is still much to be gained from a critical and reflexive dialogue between people working at this crucial nexus. Continuing to stimulate and nourish such a dialogue remains one of CMC’s key aims. Recently, one of us attended the launch of a book which collects contributions under the heading Participating in the Knowledge Society: Researchers Beyond the University