Itinerant soliloquies: A visual qualitative method to explore the social perception of environmental crime

• In Event: Visual Approaches in Green Criminology

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to suggest new methodological paths to explore and map the social perception and the social imagination that rotate around environmental crimes and harms. The questions I pose are the following: How do social actors interpret and feel about those environmental crimes that impact social and natural worlds? How can one explore the various forms through which environmental crime and victimization can be perceived, beginning from one’s own experience of life? In order to investigate these complex dimensions, I propose a technique that could be defined “itinerant soliloquy.” Those participating in the research are asked to take the researcher to a place that deals with the social perception of environmental crime. Interviewees are then asked to walk around that place and try to express aloud the “stream of consciousness” (thoughts and emotions) that might arise during the walk and to take photographs. The soliloquy of the subject is registered and the route is filmed from a distance. The participant is also asked to comment on her/his “itinerant soliloquy” ex post. Following the idea that the cognitive dimension is not enough to catch the sense of these events—that “what happens depends on where it happens”—the “itinerant soliloquy” tries to increase the value of the experiential and reflexive richness born of the encounter of the walking, the observing, the interpreting, the reflecting, the narrating—to oneself and to others—and the photographing, opening the criminological imagination to new forms of reflection and research on environmental crimes.

Author

• Lorenzo Natali, University of Milan - Bicocca