Concerning cars: Automobility and the contours of control, order and harm

• In Event: Theoretical Advances in Critical Criminology

Abstract

Criminology has been coincident with the motor age. The history of automobility is in part a story about changing patterns of crime and social control. The contours of crime and control are bound up with the rise of hegemonic automobility. Yet the car has remained in relative obscurity as a focus of criminological attention – often present, sometimes investigated as a niche topic, but at the same time somehow absent. Against this backdrop, this paper describes some key elements of the mutually constitutive relation between automobility and the changing contours of control, order and harm, and offers some preliminary conceptual resources for identifying and investigating the criminological resonances of that most pervasive and mundane of modern objects: the automobile. By treating auto-dominance as a form of ‘slow violence’ we can, I argue, make the car into a vehicle for rethinking how to practice criminology in the face of climate breakdown.

Author

• Ian Loader, University of Oxford