Cultural Criminology: Script Rewrites

• In Event: Jock Young Memorial Panel on Cultural Criminology

Abstract

A decade has passed since the late Jock Young and I published ‘Cultural criminology: some notes on the script’ (2004), the opening article of a special edition for the journal Theoretical Criminology on cultural criminology. Our goal with that article and the wider special edition was to introduce some of the core theoretical and methodological elements of cultural criminology and promote to a wider international audience what was then still a fairly new sub disciplinary variant. This paper shares that goal, but also seeks to take stock of cultural criminology’s continued evolution and document some of the subtle yet very important conceptual reconfigurations and position shifts that have occurred in the field over the last decade or so. It will also attempt to address a number of stock criticisms that continue to haunt cultural criminology. Building, on both the spirit and the rubric of our original article, this paper should be seen as something along the lines of a “script rewrite”, the type of narrative correction or plot readjustment that is a common feature of film or television production. There as here, the primary goal of this rewrite is a better finished product, capable of appealing to as wide an audience as possible; a goal that the late Jock Young strived for throughout his long and distinguished career.

Author

• Keith Hayward, University of Kent, UK