Conclusion: Popular Criminology Revisited

The concluding chapter discusses the significance of popular criminology, revisiting the key issues addressed in the different chapters of the book. It highlights the diversity of contemporary crime-and-deviance-related popular culture and provides an outlook for future research in the field

Surrounded by sound: noise, rights and environments

Noise was probably the first environmental pollutant (apart from human waste) in the Ancient world. Yet today, by comparison with other environmental matters, noise and protection from its effects are often overlooked, except in specialist fields such as architecture or planning. One major reason for this may be that noise does not possess the same ability to spread that is characteristic of other forms of pollution. Noise is also an unusual form of environmental pollution in having a physical impact – it is ‘heard’ and can be ‘felt’ – but is predominantly interpreted subjectively. The impact and consequences of anthropogenic noise for humans and biodiversity in general, are currently under-investigated in criminology and are under-addressed in both public and private international environmental law. Here we question why noise has not (so far) been explored within green criminology and only tentatively explored within cultural criminology. The objectives are to provide an overview of noise as a topic, connecting media, culture, anti- and pro-social behaviour, and to unearth interconnections between the matter of noise and its implications for the environment

False Starts, Wrong Turns and Dead Ends: Reflections on Recent Developments in Criminology

The nature and direction of criminology has changed significantly over the past two decades. The subject area has also grown exponentially and become more diverse. New fields of inquiry are opening up as new issues are added to the criminological agenda. However, at the same time there are some unwelcome developments in the discipline that impact on the orientation of the subject and which detract from its overall viability and standing. The aim of this paper is to identify these unwelcome trends in order to contribute to the development of a more critical and coherent criminology

Mike Presdee (1944-2009) - cultural criminologist and champion of a life less ordinary

Mike Presdee was a sociologist of international acclaim and considerable personal magnetism. His work focused on the sociology of youth and cultural criminology. He was fascinated by the way in which young people are criminalized and controlled; of youth being seen as the problem rather than young people being the locus of the problems of the system. Later in life he emerged as a key fi gure in the burgeoning fi eld of cultural criminology, convinced of the impossibility of understanding crime (or any other form of human behavior for that matter) in terms of survey data and quantitative analysis. He argued that ‘numerical life’ had little if any relationship with ‘actual life’, that there was a chronic split between academic knowledge, the gaze from above, and everyday experience and the view from below revealed by ethnography and biography. He maintained that orthodox criminology was driven by the administrative concerns of the powerful which present problems as obvious and uncontested and set the research agenda of the social scientist. Why he asks is it ‘obvious to all…that we need research into the “evilness” of young people rather than the oppression of young people; the evils of drink and drugs rather than why we take substances that might even include enjoyment and the excitement of transgression’? (Presdee, 2004a). Such a power driven knowledge presents itself as part of a rational research agenda where the very presence of power is occluded. He then turns to the researchers themselves, noticing their poverty of experience, their exclusion from the lived worlds of the people they research, thus neatly reversing the conventional nostrum: it is the social scientist who is marginalized from the social world rather than those deemed marginalized and objects of study