Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism

This book provides a short, comprehensive and accessible introduction to Ultra-Realism: a unique and radical school of criminological thought that has been developed by the authors over a number of years. After first outlining existing schools of thought, their major intellectual flaws and their underlying politics in a condensed guide that will be invaluable to all undergraduate and postgraduate students, Hall and Winlow introduce a number of important new concepts to criminology and suggest a new philosophical foundation, theoretical framework and research programme. These developments will enhance the discipline’s ability to explain human motivations, construct insightful representations of reality and answer the fundamental question of why some human beings risk inflicting harm on others to further their own interests or achieve various ends.Combining new philosophical and psychosocial approaches with a clear understanding of the shape of contemporary global crime, this book presents an intellectual alternative to the currently dominant paradigms of conservatism, neoclassicism and left-liberalism. In using an advanced conception of "harm", Hall and Winlow provide original explanations of criminal motivations and make the first steps towards a paradigm shift that will help criminology to illuminate the reality of our times

Anti-Nirvana: crime, culture and instrumentalism in the age of insecurity

‘Anti-Nirvana’ explores the relationship between consumer culture, media and criminal motivations. It has appeared consistently on the list of the top-ten most-read articles in this award-winning international journal, and it mounts a serious neo-Freudian challenge to the predominant naturalistic notion of ‘resistance’ at the heart of liberal criminology and media studies. It is also cited in the Oxford Handbook of Criminology and other criminology texts as a persuasive argument in support of the theory that criminality amongst young people is strongly linked to the acquisitive values of consumerism and the images of possessive individualism that dominate mass media

Criminology and Consumerism

For too long criminologists have either ignored consumerism or misunderstood the role it plays in the constitution and reproduction of our current way of life. Few in criminology have acknowledged that consumerism is now integral to our global political economy, and even fewer have offered critical accounts of the vital functional and ideological roles consumerism has played throughout the history of capitalism. There is, of course, a valuable literature that covers most aspects of consumerism and consumer culture, but the illuminating concepts and analyses associated with this literature have yet to be integrated into our discipline. Here we argue that criminologists must now make a concerted attempt to push critical accounts of consumerism towards the centre of our discipline

Doing the Right Thing: Some Notes on the Control of Research in British Criminology

In this chapter we discuss some of the problems associated with developing forms of ethical oversight in the field of criminology and criminal justice. We argue that the core concerns of institutional ethics committees are inextricably bound up with the logic of the market. The ongoing marketization of the university is, quite clearly, affecting the production of knowledge, and institutional ethics committees now possess an unstated and unacknowledged desire to defend the institution from litigation and reputational damage. This desire now exhorts a subtle but powerful influence upon the deliberations of institutional ethics committees. Using our own research backgrounds and engagement with institutional ethics committees as a foundation for our critique, we argue that ethnography, and in situ social research more generally, must be protected from those forces that would seek to formalise, sanitise and control it

Realist Criminology and its Discontents

Critical criminology must move beyond twentieth-century empiricist and idealist paradigms because the concepts and research programmes influenced by these paradigms are falling into obsolescence. Roger Matthews’ recent work firmly advocates this position and helps to set the ball rolling. Here we argue that Matthews’ attempt to use critical realist thought to move Left Realism towards an advanced position can help to put criminology on a sound new footing. However, before this becomes possible numerous philosophical and theoretical issues must be ironed out. Most importantly, critical criminology must avoid political pragmatism and adopt a more critical stance towards consumer culture’s spectacle. A searching analysis of these issues suggests that, ultimately, criminology is weighed down with obsolete thinking to such an extent that to remain intellectually relevant it must move beyond both Left Realism and Critical Realism to construct a new ultra-realist position

Big Trouble or Little Evils: The ideological struggle over the concept of harm

This chapter builds upon the authors’ previous work, which suggests that there has never been a ‘civilizing process’ across the course of modernity but an economically functional conversion of harms from physical brutality to socio-symbolic aggression. Although harm is integrated into the system’s generative core it appears as morbid symptoms during dysfunctional intervallic periods. The subject’s acceptance of core harms and their various manifestations can be best explained in a theoretical framework of transcendental materialism, with a focus on the process of deaptation, which proliferates harms as morbid symptoms appearing in the tension between a changing real world and ossified ideologies. Capitalism can be best explained as a process of managed deaptation, which constantly puts us at risk of the continuation and unpredictable mutation of a broad spectrum of harms. The criminalization of harms is maintained in a state of imbalance by the catastrophizing negative ideology of capitalist realism, which compels us to legitimize the existing spectrum of harms by constantly warning us of the far greater harms we would risk should we instigate a process of transformation. Given star billing in an endless cautionary tale, potential transformative harms are condemned as absolute, intolerable and inevitable while the system’s everyday morbid harms are excused as relative, tolerable and contingent. This dominant ideology operates at the core of the criminalization process, legitimizing negative rights and compelling us to regard specific types of crime as the ‘price of freedom’ while downplaying the harms they cause