Keith J. Hayward

Cultural Criminology:: Some Notes on the Script

Let us start with a question: what is this phenomenon called ‘cultural criminology’? Above all else, it is the placing of crime and its control in the context of culture; that is, viewing both crime and the agencies of control as cultural products—as creative constructs. As such, they must be read in terms of the meanings they carry. Furthermore, cultural criminology seeks to highlight the interaction between these two elements: the relationship and the interaction between constructions upwards and constructions downwards. Its focus is always upon the continuous generation of meaning around interaction; rules created, rules broken, a constant interplay of moral entrepreneurship, moral innovation and transgression.

Terrorist (E)motives: The Existential Attractions of Terrorism

This article describes a number of possible existential motivations for engaging in terrorism. Three in particular are identified: (1) the desire for excitement, (2) the desire for ultimate meaning, and (3) the desire for glory. Terrorism, according to the argument set out here, is as much a site of individual self-drama and self-reinvention as a tactical instrument for pursuing the political goals of small groups. The conclusion explores the concept of “existential frustration,” and suggests that terrorist activity may provide an outlet for basic existential desires that cannot find expression through legitimate channels.

Visual criminology: cultural criminology-style: Keith Hayward makes the case for ‘visual criminology’

One of the defining features of the last decade has been the rise of the ‘Mediascape’ – that bundle of media which manufactures information and disseminates images via an ever expanding array of digital technologies. From criminals who record their crimes and post them on YouTube, to the grainy CCTV footage that drives the slurry of primetime ‘cops and robbers’ compilation shows. From unreal ‘reality TV’ moments that shape moral values and social norms, to stylised representations of crime and power in comic books and even on criminology textbook covers. Ours is a world ‘where the screen scripts the street and the street scripts the screen’, where there is no clearly linear sequence, but rather a shifting interplay between the real and the virtual, the factual and the fictional.

Pantomime justice: A cultural criminological analysis of ‘life stage dissolution’

Adopting the perspective of cultural criminology, this paper asserts that the century-old opposition between the adolescent/youth stage and adulthood is now being challenged by a late-modern capitalist culture functioning artificially to extend the former. Using examples from across the cultural script, the paper introduces the concept of ‘life stage dissolution’ (and its attendant bi-directional processes of ‘adultification’ and ‘infantilisation’) to suggest it is becoming more difficult for young people to differentiate and disassociate themselves from the generation immediately ahead of them, and indeed vice versa. The result is a sort of generational mulch where shared and interchangeable cultural experiences are now the norm. The second half of the paper provides some preliminary and deliberately provocative remarks about the implications of life stage dissolution for criminology and criminal justice. This will include an analysis of emerging processes that I have termed ‘pantomime justice’, a useful way of understanding how crime stories today often seem to unfold as a conjoined adult-child experience in contemporary society.

Cultural criminology: Script rewrites

A decade has passed since Jock Young and I published ‘Cultural criminology: Some notes on the script’, the opening article of a special edition on cultural criminology for Theoretical Criminology. This ‘sequel’ article looks back on developments in the field during the intervening decade as well as responding to some of the criticisms that have emerged in the same period. In particular, it addresses the following critical concerns: that cultural criminology has an inherent romanticism towards its object of study; that it fails to consider or incorporate broader gender dynamics in its analysis; and that cultural criminologists are unable to formulate any meaningful policy measures other than non-interventionism. In responding to these criticisms the article highlights some of the subtle yet important conceptual reconfigurations that have occurred in cultural criminology as it continues to consolidate its position within the discipline.

Never boring: Jock Young as cultural criminologist:

Jock Young (1942–2013) was one of the world’s foremost criminologists. This paper traces his academic career in sociology and criminology and its culmination in the theoretical, methodological, and interventionist approach known as cultural criminology. Drawing on a 2008 interview with Professor Young and the authors’ longstanding relationship with him, this paper in addition explores the convergence of Young’s intellectual trajectory with the emerging contours of cultural criminology.

‘Life stage dissolution’ in Anglo‐American advertising and popular culture: Kidults, Lil’ Britneys and Middle Youths

The ‘long road to adulthood’ that supposedly now characterizes the period from the teens to the late twenties (for individuals in developed countries) has been the subject of much recent media and academic commentary. This paper adopts a sociological perspective to review and critique this commentary, and in particular the argument made by certain developmental psychologists that the period between adolescence and fully-fledged adulthood is now distinct enough to constitute a new stage in the life cycle known as ‘emerging adulthood’. In contrast, it is argued that, rather than anything as significant as a new life stage, what is actually happening is the erosion of established ones. To illustrate this point, the article introduces the new theoretical concept of ‘life stage dissolution’ (and its attendant bi-directional processes of ‘adultification’ and ‘infantilization’) – a blurring (or more accurately merging) process that makes it increasingly difficult for young people to differentiate and disassociate themselves from the generation immediately ahead of them, and indeed vice versa. The paper argues that, whilst this process takes a number of cultural/psychosocial forms, it is at its most prominent in contemporary Anglo-American advertising and marketing practices that actively seek to erode traditionally demarcated adult and childhood roles, differences, and oppositions as a new and distinct message within contemporary consumerism.

The critical terrorism studies–cultural criminology nexus: some thoughts on how to ‘toughen up’ the critical studies approach

This article adopts the perspective of cultural criminology to engage with some of the recent criticisms that have surfaced regarding critical terrorism studies (CTS). In particular, this article responds to a number of commentators who have implored CTS to move away from discursive and constructivist accounts of terrorism and to concentrate instead on more tangible social relations linked to politico-economic interests and historical conditions. This article proceeds in two parts. First, it outlines the many intellectual and epistemological commonalities that exist between CTS and cultural criminology. It then takes a more critical turn by offering up a series of examples drawn from cultural criminology that could be useful in making the ‘critical’ in CTS less ambiguous.

Mike Presdee (1944-2009) - cultural criminologist and champion of a life less ordinary

Mike Presdee was a sociologist of international acclaim and considerable personal magnetism. His work focused on the sociology of youth and cultural criminology. He was fascinated by the way in which young people are criminalized and controlled; of youth being seen as the problem rather than young people being the locus of the problems of the system. Later in life he emerged as a key fi gure in the burgeoning fi eld of cultural criminology, convinced of the impossibility of understanding crime (or any other form of human behavior for that matter) in terms of survey data and quantitative analysis. He argued that ‘numerical life’ had little if any relationship with ‘actual life’, that there was a chronic split between academic knowledge, the gaze from above, and everyday experience and the view from below revealed by ethnography and biography. He maintained that orthodox criminology was driven by the administrative concerns of the powerful which present problems as obvious and uncontested and set the research agenda of the social scientist. Why he asks is it ‘obvious to all…that we need research into the “evilness” of young people rather than the oppression of young people; the evils of drink and drugs rather than why we take substances that might even include enjoyment and the excitement of transgression’? (Presdee, 2004a). Such a power driven knowledge presents itself as part of a rational research agenda where the very presence of power is occluded. He then turns to the researchers themselves, noticing their poverty of experience, their exclusion from the lived worlds of the people they research, thus neatly reversing the conventional nostrum: it is the social scientist who is marginalized from the social world rather than those deemed marginalized and objects of study.

Jock Young (1942-2013)

More than any other criminologist of his generation, Jock Young shaped the nature and direction of the discipline and has been at the forefront of almost every major development in the sociology of crime and deviance over the past four decades. Revered and respected for his scholarly activities, he will also be remembered for his charisma, humour and famously warm and relaxed manner that inspired all those who knew and worked with him.