Criminology has been reluctant to embrace fictional narratives as a tool for understanding, explaining and reducing crime and social harm.
In this philosophical enquiry, McGregor uses examples from films, television, novels and graphic novels to demonstrate the extensive criminological potential of fiction around the world. Building on previous studies of non-fiction narratives, the book is the first to explore the ways criminological fiction provides knowledge of the causes of crime and social harm.
For academics, practitioners and students, this is an engaging and thought-provoking critical analysis that establishes a bold new theory of criminological fiction.
designate the possibility of entering a new geological era due to human influence ( Berkhout, 2014 ; Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016 ), visible traces are no longer mere scratches on the planetary surface. If, given the magnitude of human activities, the challenge is more and more to think about their consequences, it is also useful to explore what imaginative foundations can be used as a basis for collective reflections. From this point of view, science fiction may have the advantage of having anticipated the movement. It has already contributed to displaying these
The Departed I have used seven case studies in this book, the first six to demonstrate the aetiological value of narrative fiction for criminology and the seventh to demonstrate the pedagogic value of narrative fiction for criminology. My weighting among these case studies reveals my primary interest in narrative fiction from a criminological perspective, which is in the cinematic mode of representation in general and feature films in particular. As discussed in Chapter 7 , my focus has been on the Hollywood film industry and within that industry, for
resemblance to the reality and the directorial sleight of hand is compounded by Thomas Jane, who plays the part with charisma, charm, and pathos. Stander’s egoism, hubris, and psychopathic personality traits such as sexual predation and animal abuse have been replaced with a self-sacrificial concern for the victims of apartheid for which there is no evidence (Moorcraft and Cohen 1984 ). As such, the film provides an example of why most criminologists are sceptical about the criminological value of fiction and of the obstacles that must be negotiated if fiction is to be
117 7 Imagining Dystopian Futures in Young Adult Fiction Works of fiction offer great potential for doing imaginative criminology as they ‘offer complex and layered social realities that can be explored criminologically and sociologically’ (Frauley, 2010: 13). Fiction is vitally important to generating images and fantasies about social life and offers the possibility to create and participate in other worlds and new ways of life. This chapter explores imagined dystopias in young adult fiction as a means to think through problems of ordering, social
139 op en s pa ce © The Policy Press • 2013 • ISSN 2046 7435 Families, Relationships and Societies • vol 2 • no 1 • 2013 • 139–46 http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/204674313X664770 Interpreting our lives: memory, truth and fiction Sue Eckstein Interpreters is a novel that explores the secrets and lies within families, the parent–child relationship, the interpretation of the past and the collective and personal guilt of a generation who grew up in Nazi Germany. Mindful of the moral and ethical issues inherent in memoir and autobiography, I explore the challenges
243 THIRTEEN Ageing, fiction, narrative exchange and everyday life Philip Tew and Nick Hubble Introduction This chapter focuses on the development, engagement with respondents and analytical results of the ‘Fiction and Cultural Mediation of Ageing’ project (FCMAP) that was part of the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA), a UK cross-Research Council initiative. From its inception FCMAP sought novel ways to access the opinions of older subjects about the facts and experiences of ageing in a manner that radically diminished any influence over (or implicit guidance
transhumanism in the public media are implausible. Superman on Viagra, or Wonderwoman with Botox, is not what all transhumanists subscribe to as a central goal, and not what they should subscribe to either, given their own initial premises. I show why a radically pluralist concept of the good is more plausible. No non-formal judgement concerning the good is plausible. Section three will be dedicated to the question of what counts as morally right from a transhumanist perspective. Even though any concept of the right is regarded as fictive, this does not imply that it is
Chapter summary Within this chapter I explore how black crime fiction operates much the same as a researcher investigating the complexities of black life through immersive observation such as ethnography. Black crime fiction, I would argue, lifts the veil on black criminality, victimhood, and offending, much the same as any other crime fiction genre. However, additionally, what black crime fiction does, through character interaction, plot construction, propelled by a black vernacular, is to shine a light on the nuances of race, that shape elements of black
131 FIVE Soft governance, policy fictions and translation zones: European policy spaces and their making Noémi Lendvai Introduction Translation offers immensely rich repertoires for tracing policies as they move, travel and morph. However, while many different things move (ideas, templates, policy toolkits, actors, actants, artefacts, lessons, best practices), we know remarkably little about how policies travel across languages, or how policies are produced through translation practices. This chapter aims to interrogate the European Union’s (EU’s) Open
