Listening Criminologically: On Sound and the Sensory

• In Event: Listening to Justice, Listening to Injustice

Abstract

Criminology has recently seen growing engagement with the sensory landscape as an interpretive terrain. Following the recent acoustic turn in legal studies and political theory, criminology has been grappling with some of the complexities of sound, often as part of a broader effort to analyse the sensory landscape as an interpretive terrain (McClanahan & South, 2020, 9). But as Lee notes in his ‘challenge to criminology’ (2022, 3), there is a need for criminologists to take engage more deeply with sound, investigating what Russell and Carlton (2020) have termed ‘acoustemologies’ by which sound produces knowledge, affect, and experience. In this paper, I consider sound as a key aspect of criminology’s ‘sensorium’ (Herrity, Schmidt and Warr, 2021), asking what is involved when we listen criminologically. Close attention will be paid to the relationship between sound, silence and noise, in the context of political protest and civil dissent.

Author

• Alison Young, University of Melbourne