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Maguire, Morgan & Reiner: The Oxford Handbook of Criminology 4e

Chapter 04

Many of the ideas and themes covered in this chapter will be explored in greater detail in the forthcoming text Cultural Criminology, co-authored by Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward, and Jock Young (2007, London: Sage).

The first book to announce cultural criminology as a specific theoretical variant was Jeff Ferrell and Clinton Sanders' Cultural Criminology (1995, Boston: Northeastern University Press), an edited collection of essays on crime and culture that included chapters on criminal subcultures, media representations of crime, and various criminalized forms of music and style. Ferrell has done as much as anyone to promote cultural criminology, both in a series of important statement articles (see Ferrell 1999, 2004, and his entry in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology (2006, Oxford: Blackwell), and in a number of thoughtful cultural criminological case-study monographs (e.g. Crimes of Style (1996, Boston: Northeastern University Press) on graffiti subcultures; Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy (2001, New York: Palgrave) on corporate urban redevelopment and the demise of public space; and Empire of Scrounge (2006, New York: New York University Press) on the illicit worlds of street scrounging and dumpster diving. For a student-friendly introduction to the crime-culture relationship, see Ferrell's chapter, 'Crime and Culture', in the Oxford University Press textbook Criminology (2005, edited by C. Hale, K. Hayward, A. Wahidin, and E. Wincup).

Another useful introduction to cultural criminology that includes research into crime and culture across a variety of local, regional, and national settings is the stimulating collection of essays gathered together by Ferrell, Hayward, Morrison, and Presdee in Cultural Criminology Unleashed (2004, London: Glasshouse Press); as is the 2004 Special Edition of the international journal Theoretical Criminology (8(3) ), edited by Hayward and Young. Mike Presdee's monograph Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime (2000) did much to promote cultural criminology in the United Kingdom, as did Hayward's cultural analysis of the changing nature of urban space/crime in City Limits: Crime, Consumerism and the Urban Experience (2004)—both texts focusing on the commodification of crime and the visceral, emotive thrill of certain forms of expressive criminality (see, relatedly, the work of Stephen Lyng (1990); and, of course, most famously Jack Katz's (1988) seminal text, Seductions of Crime).

For an insight into some of the ethnographic approaches associated with cultural criminology see Ferrell and Hamm's Ethnography at the Edge (1998, Boston: Northeastern University Press), Stephanie Kane's article, 'The unconventional methods in cultural criminology', in the aforementioned Special Edition of Theoretical Criminology, and a number of the chapters in Cyndi Banks' edited book, Developing Cultural Criminology: Theory and Practice in Papua New Guinea (2000). For examples of cultural criminological research on crime and the media see Peter Manning's chapter, 'Media loops', in Bailey and Hale (1998), Gregg Barak's writing on 'newsmaking criminology' (e.g. 1994), the chapters in Part 3 of Ferrell et al., Cultural Criminology Unleashed, and the new journal Crime, Media, Culture (London: Sage), a periodical dedicated to exploring the relationships between crime, criminal justice, and the media.

For further examples of cultural criminological research, readers are advised to explore the references listed in the present chapter. Finally, to access a number of key papers and to keep up to date with news about conferences and publications in the area of cultural criminology log on to www.culturalcriminology.org.