The sights of criminal justice
This event will focus on visual methods of research, including an analysis of visual and audio-visual materials, as well as photo elicitation techniques, where research participants capture their experiences in images rather than words.
Panel wise abstracts/bios
1. Capturing Race: Photo Elicitation in the Life Histories of Young Minority Ethnic Youth (Dr Alpa Parmar)
Dr Alpa Parmar has had to withdraw from the event due to unforeseen circumstances. You can still view her abstract and bio below.
The visual turn in criminology (Carrabine 2012) was an important and necessary development that reoriented the criminological gaze towards recognising the power of images. Representations of crime and their analysis have become more of a focus, as have the use of visual methodologies in criminological research. Less scholarly attention, however, has reflected on the role of visual methods for understanding the relationship between race and crime. In this paper, I discuss how photo elicitation was adopted in a study that aimed to capture the life histories of young Black and Asian men who have been caught up in the English criminal justice system. Drawing on Barthes’ (1980) concept of the punctum and the capacity of photographs to affect us on a personal level, in this paper I discuss how the use of photographs in the research augmented the life history interviews and allowed an understanding of the viscerality of race, experiences of racism and multicultural conviviality in significant ways.
Bio: Dr Alpa Parmar is a Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford and academic member of the Sentencing Council for England and Wales. Her research interests include understanding the intersection between race and crime, criminal law and migration control and exploring the role of sentencing and policing for explaining racial disproportionality in the criminal justice process.
2. From Optograms to X-Rays: How to Conjure a Spectral Criminological Image (Dr Michael Fiddler)
You can view the recording of this presentation below. Please note, the BSL interpretation of this event was recorded during a live interaction, and may contain errors due to the nature of the content, and/or speakers being unknown to participants. The intention is always to provide a true and accurate interpretation and is tailored purely to the needs of the people present. Please bear this in mind when watching the recorded version.
Click here to view Dr Michael Fiddlers' presentation slides
Drawing upon recent criminological scholarship examining spectrality, this paper sets out a hauntological framework for exploring traumas of the past and future being inflicted upon the living in the present. Given the discipline’s spectral turn, we can begin to capture those figures, groups and concepts that have been rendered invisible, as well as attend to harms that have persistent afterlives.
Our point of departure is Trevor Paglen’s (2015) “Trinity Cube”. This sculpture is part of an unseen exhibit located in the Fukushima exclusion zone and will not be accessible until restrictions around the site of the 2011 nuclear disaster are lifted. Trinity Cube allows us to consider (in)visible harms that are experienced when time is perceived as “out of joint”. In order to unpack this, we must look back towards early visual systems used to capture an imagined criminal Other. Optograms and composite portraiture both utilised the language or techniques of spirit photography to generate their spectral imagery. Here, we offer an alternative means of conjuring a spectral criminological image. By extending Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, we can generate a hauntological image that allows us to conceptualize harms that exist across a collapsed past, present and future. This is a “spectral” image that can help us to understand the persistent impact of the “no longer”, as well as the harms of the “not yet”.
Bio: Michael Fiddler is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Greenwich. He joined the University in 2006 after completing his PhD at Keele University. His thesis explored the production of space within and around prisons. His published research has explored the ways in which space, architecture and visual arts coalesce to inform understandings of crime and punishment. His current research is informed by Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology and he is a co-editor of the forthcoming edited collection ‘Ghost Criminology’, published by New York University Press.
3. News, Crime and Culture 1991-2021: ‘news is our guidance, our conscience and our redemption; sometimes familiarity should breed contempt or at least criticism’ (Dr Maggie Wykes)
You can view the recording of this presentation below. Please note, the BSL interpretation of this event was recorded during a live interaction, and may contain errors due to the nature of the content, and/or speakers being unknown to participants. The intention is always to provide a true and accurate interpretation and is tailored purely to the needs of the people present. Please bear this in mind when watching the recorded version.
Click here to view Dr Maggie Wykes' presentation slides.
This paper considers the analytical journey from writing about news coverage of race in the inner cities of the 1980s to researching news about sexual violence 40 years later. The turbulence of the 1980s happened well before the ‘internet existed as a consumer experience’ (Andrew Marr Observer (2.8.1998). MOSAIC opened up browsing from 1993 but even in 1998, Marr commented, if you could access the internet ‘you found a nerd-scape, baffling and dull’ (ibid). In 2021 my journey ends in a veritable explosion of electronic information sources that enable new offences like revenge porn and trolling, blur fact and fiction and reduce news to ‘tweets’. In 2001 I argued that:
"Culture is changing as rapidly as electronic communication is binding nations, institutions and individuals into a single (however unstable, exclusive and fragmented) cyber-communications system......the systematic analysis of news in relation to identifiable power, norms and values, is rapidly becoming more urgent and less possible for anyone concerned about the role of the media (Wykes 2001:7)".
‘Less possible’ but nonetheless I tried and this paper explores that analytical journey and asks why it seems not to have taken us very far.
Bio: Dr Maggie Wykes has taught and researched media and cultural studies, journalism and criminology. She retired from the University of Sheffield in June 2020. Her focus has always been on the intersections of power, crime, identity and discourses.
Event chair
Dr Gilly Sharpe is a Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Law and a former youth justice social worker. Her research focuses on two areas. The first of these is youth justice policy and practice – in particular the assessment, criminalisation, and penal governance of young women – and the second concerns (ex-)offenders’ experiences of life after punishment. Her first monograph, Offending Girls: Young Women and Youth Justice, was published by Routledge in 2012. She also co-authored Criminal Careers in Transition: The Social Context of Desistance from Crime (Oxford University Press, 2014). Gilly is currently working on a longitudinal follow-up study of Offending Girls, to be published by Routledge.
You can view the transcription for this event here.