The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology

Jennifer Fleetwood, Lois Presser, Sveinung Sandberg, Thomas Ugelvik, Jennifer Fleetwood, Lois Presser, Sveinung Sandberg, Thomas Ugelvik

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781787690080, 9781787690066
• eBook ISBN: 9781787690073
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Narrative criminology is an approach to studying crime and other harm that puts stories first. It investigates how such stories are composed, when and why they are told and what their effects are. This edited collection explores the methodological challenges of analysing offenders' stories, but pushes the boundaries of the field to consider the narratives of victims, bystanders and criminal justice professionals. 

This Handbook reflects the diversity of methodological approaches employed in narrative criminology. Chapters discuss the practicalities of listening to and observing narratives through ethnographic and observational research, and offer accessible guides to using diverse methodological approaches for listening to and interpreting narrative data. 

With contributions from established and emerging scholars from all over the world, and from diverse fields including politics, psychology, sociology and criminology, the Handbook reflects the cutting edge of narrative methodologies for understanding crime, control and victimisation and is an essential resource for academics studying and teaching on narrative criminology.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Jennifer Fleetwood, Lois Presser, Sveinung Sandberg and Thomas Ugelvik

Rosario Castellanos' (1962) The Book of Lamentations and Mario Vargas Llosas' (1981) The War of the End of the World tell epic stories of poor indigenous people fighting for their physical and spiritual lives. Both describe fictional characters, inhabiting the impoverished states of Chiapas in Mexico (Castellanos) and Bahia in Brazil (Llosas), who were inspired by real people and events to revolt. As in these books so in ‘life’: intertwined Catholic and local beliefs have been narrative resources in actual indigenous revolts against ethnic, class and colonial hierarchies. Narratives can also legitimise conquest, and not just rebellion, as Keeton (2015) shows in his analysis of the link between Old Testament narratives and the colonisation of the US. Biblical stories move: they are carried and passed on by people, traversing continents and oceans. Narratives also travel in time, enduring thousands of years, continuously changing and intermingling with other stories.

Narratives undergird power as well as resistance. They have created some of the darkest moments in human history. The Third Reich built its legitimacy on epic stories of valour and glory adapted from a mythical northern European past. Narratives can also challenge harms; tales of native people's resistance were crucial for the renowned Zapatista uprising of 1994. These events, motivated by stories, are rewritten in the present, acquiring new emphases and significance. Stories move in and out of ‘reality’. Some have an historical point of reference, others do not; it is their ‘storiness’ (Hogan, 2003, p. 203) that gives them their unique power. Power to defend the established order and do harm, but also power to change society and better the conditions under which people live. The capacity of stories to explain, guide, and arouse is at the heart of narrative criminology. Put simply, stories shape our social world; they inspire us to do or resist harms. With careful and close attention, they can tell us a great deal.

Hence this volume. For ease, we have organised it by moment in the process of research – collecting versus analysing stories. Around this somewhat arbitrary binary is a profusion of discoveries as to what narrative criminology – indeed, criminology – can do and be. This chapter introduces the volume and addresses three key questions. First: where have we been? What research has been done to date in narrative criminology? What have we learnt? Second: what are this Handbook's specific contributions to the field? Third: what are some important future directions in narrative criminology? What has narrative criminology yet to grasp, hone or pay attention to? What good could it do in the world?

Looking Back

Stories connect the present with the past and future, and so too are the present and future of narrative criminology closely connected to its past in any recognisable account. Where did narrative criminology come from? Several origin stories have been told (Maruna, 2015; Presser & Sandberg, 2015a, Sandberg & Ugelvik, 2016a). Linkages to mid-century American sociology are often highlighted. Sykes and Matza's (1957) description of how delinquents use ‘techniques of neutralisation’ to make their offending behaviour morally justifiable is said to be an important inspiration, as is Mills' (1940) elucidation of ‘vocabularies of motive’. Similarly, Scott and Lyman's (1968) study of how people's accounts of their own actions bridge the gap between action and expectation is said to be another core text. These works related socially structured discourse to individual action. Labelling theories, as well as theories of gendered action, would emphasise identity mechanisms driving that relationship. For example, narrative criminology owes a profound debt to Becker's demonstration in Outsiders (1963) that deviance is not an attribute of any act but rather the meanings attached to it. Building on insights from symbolic interactionism and especially Goffman, Katz (1988) showed that crimes are an acting out of certain narrative scripts and thus actions in general are shaped by their storytelling potential.

Maruna's (2001) Making Good, which set out the close connections between desistance from crime and narrative reconfigurations of self-image, was a rigorous take on the idea that behaviour reversals are founded on stories. Outside criminology, myriad studies have theorised specific mass harms (e.g. violent attacks on abortion clinics, criminal executions, war, terrorism) in narrative terms. In psychology, anthropology, political science, medicine, geography and still other nonliterary disciplines, the narrative turn had already taken place. Hence an alternative origin story might be that, bolstered by the development of cultural, constitutive and psychosocial criminologies, the moment had finally come for narrative criminology.

When Presser coined the term ‘narrative criminology’ in her 2009 article in Theoretical Criminology, there existed a reservoir of evidence and theory to draw from. Her paper was a timely and productive intervention that drew together and summarised several coinciding developments in the social sciences. Looking back, one is tempted to say that it was like a spark in a fireworks factory. Narrative criminology was quickly adopted by a number of scholars internationally. Sandberg further developed the framework (Sandberg, 2010, 2013, 2016) when with colleagues he analysed the importance of stories for phenomena such as terrorism, illegal drugs, drinking, violence and humour. Connections were made with visual criminology (Sandberg & Ugelvik, 2016b) and Bourdieusian criminology (Sandberg & Fleetwood, 2017, see also Fleetwood, 2014, 2016). Presser, for her part, developed narrative criminology further. Her book Why We Harm (2013) pivots from ‘crime’ in the narrow sense to encompass legal and routine harms. In Inside Story (2018) she explores why and how stories captivate audiences and drive mass harm.

As a criminological subdiscipline, narrative criminology reached maturity with the publication of the edited collection Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of Crime (Presser & Sandberg, 2015a). This volume includes a range of different studies with a variety of topics – prisoners' work on the self, drug users' use of narratives and the connection between bad trip stories and folk tales about magical creatures and dark forces. It also covers stories justifying mass atrocities and sex offences, and the relationship between cultural and narrative criminology. The anthology was followed by a special issue of the journal Crime, Media, Culture (Sandberg & Ugelvik, 2016a). This special issue covered issues such as forms of narrative, narrative habitus, boundary work, media narratives and the relationship between narrative and image.

Recent Developments

Narrative criminology is, formally speaking, only 10 years old, but it is already moving in new directions, especially around a deepening understanding of human experience and meaning making. The field is still expanding, with novel research topics, analytical perspectives and methodological options. Indeed, the last year or two has seen a rapid proliferation of narrative perspectives across various criminological areas.

Continuing narrative criminology's core interest in understanding violence, Henriksen and Bengtsson (2018) find that marginalised Danish youths describe violence as ‘nothing special’; as an acceptable and even trivial part of their lives. Colvin and Pisoiu (2018) examine the narratives of members of present-day right-wing groups in Germany, finding that violence is neutralised through tropes such as pragmatic realpolitik (a way of ‘getting results’) and the mythical race of Herrenmensch. Looking at a very different group – serial killers – James and Gossett (2018) show how even people who have committed the most heinous of crimes are able to narratively reconstruct themselves as people with high moral standards. Raitanen, Sandberg, and Oksanen (2019) explore connections between the master narrative of school shootings and personal stories of being bullied. The same kind of micro–macro link is drawn in Banks and Albertson's (2018) study of violence committed by ex-service personnel. These authors locate such violence in both personal biographies and individual psyches, and the structural conditions of advanced capitalism. Lastly, Sandberg, Copes, and Pedersen (2019) expand the traditional focus on violent populations, to ‘peaceful people’, arguing that narrative analysis far exceeds approaches such as subcultural and neutralisation theory in understanding engagement in violence.

An emerging literature concerns the narrative dimensions of representations of armed conflict and war. Following Houge's (2016) study of perpetrators of mass violence in postconflict international tribunal proceedings, Rauschenbach (2018) studies the tension between ‘judicial truth’ and other kinds of truths in interviews with individuals accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Walklate (2019) shows how images of violence and atrocity play an important part in the political aftermath of such incidents, a point that is also made by Houge (2018) in her study of international criminal tribunals as sites that impact on societal understandings of mass violence, promoting a particular kind of story.

Another core interest in narrative criminology is drug crime. In research by Webb, Copes, and Hendricks (2019), people engaged in so-called microdosing of psychedelics talk about their drug use as rational and normal, narratively emphasising connections to conventional citizens who hold middle-class values. Rather similarly, Arnull and Ryder (2019) describe how young women normalise their alcohol and marihuana use by telling stories in which they are in control of their substance use and it is all just ‘good fun’. Hammersvik's (2018) study of cannabis growers and dealers highlights camaraderie. His participants reconstruct their growing and selling of illegal drugs as a way of helping their friends. Narratives have also become important for scholars who wish to understand the absence of crimes and harm. One novel contribution here is Rowlands, Youngs, and Canter's (2019) exploration of the role of narrative identity change in substance misuse recovery.

Several recent papers offer meta arguments unpacking what narrative criminology is, what it can and should be, and how different analytical and methodological perspectives can be brought into and add to the original conceptualisation of narrative criminology. Wesely (2018) contends that, given that much narrative criminology research has been interview-based, narrative criminologists should look more closely at how interview dynamics and the narrative techniques both participants and interviewers deploy during interviews impact our analyses. Brisman (2019) shows how values that contribute to pollution and thus climate change are reproduced in stories for children. He contends that narrative criminology can very beneficially analyse fictional narratives and situates his ecology-focused work under the rubric of green cultural criminology. Presser and Sandberg (2019) have connected narrative criminology to critical criminology, arguing among other things that narrative criminology is rooted in a concern with harm, legal or illegal.

Walklate has, with her colleagues, developed narrative criminology in the direction of a narrative victimology (Walklate, Maher, McCulloch, Fitz-Gibbon, & Beavis, 2018), as have Pemberton, Mulder, and Aarten (2018), who claim great potential for the study of the multiple ways victimisation experience is embedded in life stories. Pemberton, Aarten, and Mulder (2018) highlight the need for victims to own their stories to avoid secondary victimisation. Together, these authors point to the potential for narrative approaches for understanding how victimisation is made sense of and told about, as well as how these narratives may (or may not) catalyse responses by the criminal justice system or policy makers. Narratives of victimisation are both personally and existentially significant and motivators for political and social change. Analysis of both depends on a keen attentiveness to questions of power that infuse who can tell a victim narrative.

Narrative criminology was originally explicitly centred on the narratives of offenders. There is now a sizeable literature on the narrative lives of professionals working in the social control professions. Kurtz and Upton (2018) continue this recent development and reveal that a certain kind of masculine police culture is reproduced through the sharing of stories. Similarly, Petintseva examines the narratives of youth justice workers (2018) and Baker (2018) looks at how believable truths are constructed narratively in coroners' reports. Whilst criminology has long attended to the discursive qualities of law and criminal justice institutions, studying personal narratives opens up daily practice for analysis, and the ways that individuals draw on, reproduce and adapt narratives about crime and justice. Whilst studying the ‘texts’ of law is important, narrative criminology emphasises the importance of storytelling as a form of social action – the daily performance of stories in working lives.

Narrative criminologists have mainly, although not exclusively, used qualitative methods. Canter and Youngs (e.g. Canter & Youngs, 2012; Youngs & Canter, 2012a, 2012b) have done quantitative research on the narratives of offenders for some time. Their methodological example has provided notable inspiration, especially their commitment to standardised methodological approaches reflecting their psychological approach to studying offenders. Recently, using quantitative analysis, Goodlad, Ioannou, and Hunter (2018) have explored how offenders with personality disorders and psychopathy experience committing a crime. Ciesla, Ioannou, and Hammond (2019) surveyed female prisoners to examine their narrative and emotional experiences. Kruttschnitt and Kang (2019) studied persistent offenders' understanding of their past crimes using Canter and Young's narrative ‘life as a film’ method (see...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures, Illustrations and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• PART I: COLLECTING STORIES
• PART II: ANALYSING STORIES
• Index