This unprecedentedly expansive international collection of empirical and theoretical material explores the nascent field of criminology and affect. Affect theory first arose as an analytical framework to conceptualize and understand dynamic emotional relationships between individuals and the social environment. Despite the tremendous potential utility for affect theory to assist criminologists with conceptualizing crime and justice, affect remains underutilized in criminological research. Uniting research from otherwise geographically and culturally disparate locales under affect's analytical umbrella presents a unique opportunity to demonstrate how criminologists can utilize affect theory to understand aspects of the justice process that otherwise prove elusive.
The Handbook is organized around the most pressing topics of interest to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners engaged with crime and the administration of justice. The first set of chapters explore the emotional cartographies of affective governance through engagements with affective labor in penal spaces, incorporating affect theory into genocide studies, modern ruins and feeling the rules, affective meaning in group family therapy programs, and how crime concerns and perceived victimization risks affect public support for harsher criminal sanctions. Part II examines the intersection of affective economies and organizational logics by exploring emotions in the regulation of state violence, the moral economy of mafia organizations, moral economies of the illegal caviar trade, agricultural crime and farmer mental health, and friendship in the lives of urban sex workers. The key topics underpinning Part III include incorporating affect theory into understanding decades of research on correctional populations, rehabilitating emotions through prison dog programs, journeys of women under carceral control, intuition and feelings within penal evaluation, and remorse and emotions in research on criminal-legal decision-makers. Part IV focuses on traumatic affect in problem-solving courts, affective practices in rape trials, emotional dynamics of video links and video evidence in the courtroom, emotions and perceptions of visual evidence, and affective risks and responses to intimate partner violence. Part V engages with affective positionalities through narrative criminology, reflexivity and vulnerability in sexual violence research, death penalty sentencing and hauntings of the court, jury decision-making, judicial authority, and release.
By focusing on emotion as a dynamic and transmissible component of human interaction, this important work illuminates how researchers and practitioners can account for the less tangible—but nonetheless extremely significant—aspects of the justice process.