ABSTRACT
Cultural criminology is a theoretical, methodological and interventionist approach to understanding crime and its control that views criminality and the agents of its control as cultural products, i.e. as creative constructs enmeshed within processes of meaning-making. Attentive to the realities of a deeply unequal world, cultural criminology seeks to highlight how power effects the upwards and downwards construction of criminological phenomena: how rules are made, why they are broken and the deeper implications of such processes. Recognizing this multi-dimensional nature of criminality, punishment and control, cultural criminology deploys a triadic framework (Hayward 2016) that simultaneously examines power (macro-level structural processes), meaning (meso-level group interpretations and interactions) and existential concerns (micro-level personal and subjective experiences). This multi-levelled analysis resonates with many, not least because of the way it actively seeks to situate the micro-specificities of crime and human agency within the complex backdrop of late modernity and its attendant processes of intense individualization, hyper-consumption, cultural flow and globalization.
