Cultural Criminology and Media Representations
Summary
Cultural criminology examines crime and social control through the lens of cultural meaning, emotion and symbolic practices. It foregrounds the interplay between power, style and experience in the enactment and representation of deviance. Media representations—from news reports to film, television and digital games—shape and reflect public perceptions of crime, criminal justice and punishment. Scholars explore how narratives of transgression circulate in popular and institutional contexts, how they resonate with lived experiences of marginalised populations and how they inform policing strategies. This research underscores the co‐production of cultural meaning and social order, tracing how moral panics and aesthetic spectacle configure public imaginaries. Globalisation and digital networks have extended the reach and diversity of these representations, generating new modalities of witnessing, mediated authority and subcultural resistance. Practical applications include the design of more reflexive crime‐prevention campaigns, the critique of media biases in legal contexts and the promotion of restorative justice models attentive to cultural difference and collective memory.
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Cultural Criminology and Media Representations publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in cultural criminology and media representations across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Cultural criminology: An approach analysing crime in relation to cultural meaning, affect and symbolic practices.
Media representation: The framing and presentation of events or issues in film, television, news and digital platforms.
Carcerality: The social and cultural dynamics of surveillance, confinement and punitive ideology.
Abjection: A condition of social exclusion and disgust invoked by depictions of the ‘other’ as impure or monstrous.
Hauntology: A concept describing how past traumas and spectres inform and shape contemporary cultural narratives.
References
- Abject (M)Othering: A Narratological Study of the Prison as an Abject and Uncanny Institution. Critical Criminology (2018).
- ‘You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?’: A Hauntological Analysis of Carceral Violence in Majora’s Mask. Games and Culture (2021).
- Obraz psychopaty we współczesnej kulturze a wiedza naukowa na temat psychopatii:. Perspektywy Kultury (2023).
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