Reading Pictures: Art History and the Sociology of Punishment

• In Event: Methods in Visual Criminology

Abstract

Although the attention given to images in criminology is a recent development, it is important to acknowledge that across the humanities and social sciences the visual has become a major feature of quite diverse research practices. In this paper I focus on art history and its methods, which are more varied and debated than in perhaps any other branch of the humanities, in an effort to build an interdisciplinary dialogue with the social sciences. The main aim will be methodological and will draw on my research on the ‘Iconography of Punishment’, which argues that images can help us understand penal practices of the past and the present. The word icon is from the Greek for ‘image’ and was born in a specific, religious context, reminding us that it is culturally produced and involves a process that is not at all natural, mobilising certain rhetorical strategies that can speak to the political complexities of the age.

Author

• Eamonn Carrabine, University of Essex