Creative Methodologies for a Mobile Criminology: Walking as Critical Pedagogy

Introduction

There is a long tradition of walking in ethnographic and anthropological research, but not in criminology. In this article, we make an original and significant contribution to the field by building upon social science work on mobilities and arts-based research to argue for walking as a method for doing criminological research and pedagogy. We argue that biographical walking in an urban space, linked to landmarks, places, and stories, can elicit ways of both knowing and understanding the history of crime which inspires a criminological imagination; and can be used as a critical and convivial pedagogy. Walking methods connect the mobile nature of our lives to crime and justice matters; for thinking, doing, and applying cultural and critical criminology, imaginatively. Reflecting upon using walking as a research method and the importance of biographical research, we are influenced by the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies theoretically and methodologically, symbolic interactionist and ethnographic approaches to crime, social harms and justice, as well as the fieldwork of early Chicago School sociologists. For us, walking is a way of doing critical and cultural criminology by expanding its vibrant methodological range through a focus on space, time, and place. The scholarship that informs our work includes ‘cultural criminology’ (Carrabine, 2012, 2014; Ferrell, 2018; Ferrell et al., 2004; Greer, 2009; Hayward and Presdee, 2010; Morrison, 2004; O’Neill and Seal, 2012; Penfold-Mounce, 2010; Rafter, 2000; Seal and O’Neill, 2019; Sparks, 1992; Tzanelli et al., 2005; Young, 2004) ‘biographical sociology’ (Miller, 2000a; O’Neill, 2015; Schütze, 1992), and ‘walking as an arts based method’ (Heddon, 2007; Heddon and Myers, 2014; Myers, 2010; O’Neill and Einashe, 2019; O’Neill and Hubbard, 2010; O’Neill and Roberts, 2019; Pink, 2008, 2012; Truman and Springgay, 2018).

Cultural criminology has diversified in recent years with the development of research using creative methods, images and image making, film, as well as more ‘mainstream’ ethnography, social class, and sub-cultural analysis, inspired by a ‘cultural studies’ approach to exploring crime, criminality, and social justice. Biographical research, as part of critical and cultural criminology, is gaining ground in recent years having been influenced by Carlen’s classic 1983 text on criminal women, which draws on four women’s life stories; Goodey’s (2000) research that explored the importance of biographical research for understanding (male) criminal lives; Maruna’s (2001) life-history approach to desistance from crime, and Honeywell’s (2015) autoethnography. Furthermore, McGarry and Keating’s (2015) examination of how research can inform how and what we teach using an autobiographical approach, for example, prison autobiographies, feeds into the growing recognition of biography to research-led teaching. In the context of this research landscape, we explore walking as an imaginative and innovative method for doing and theorising cultural criminological research, while also highlighting its critical pedagogic potential as a mobile criminology.

In the first section of the article we outline our cultural, theoretical, and methodological approach, before evidencing this through extracts of a walking biographical interview conducted with a convict criminologist (Dr David Honeywell). Significantly, this biographical walk led to the development of a crime walk in York (reflecting another crime walk in Durham) now used as a pedagogical approach for teaching criminology to undergraduates and other publics, as this is a free self-guiding fully podcasted web-based facility. Consequently, in the final section we summarise our approach and the potential impact upon criminological teaching and learning, through a mobile, critical, imaginative pedagogy.

Criminological imagination, biographical walking, and mobile pedagogy

Back in 1959, C. Wright Mills wrote of the promise of what he named the sociological imagination, saying it ‘enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise’ (Mills, 2000 [1959]: 7–8). Criminology has adopted this imaginative approach primarily through cultural criminology, which focuses on everyday meanings of crime, transgression, and phenomenological analysis as well as methodologies that are predominantly ethnographic, textual, visual, and participatory (Brown and Carrabine, 2017; Carrabine, 2012; Ferrell, 1993, 2006; Ferrell et al., 2004; Ferrell and Hamm, 1998; Hayward and Presdee, 2010; Millington, 2016; O’Brien M, 2005; O’Neill, 2010, 2015, 2017; Rafter, 2014). Cultural criminology, for us, adopts a criminologically imaginative stance to research following in the footsteps of the Chicago school (sociological research; see Anderson, 1923; Shaw, 1931; Thomas and Znaniecki, 1958 [1918]). In adopting a cultural criminological approach, we seek to fulfil the need for a more ‘supple and emergent’ (Ferrell, 2018: 190) method and pedagogic tool to understand and engage with matters of crime and deviance with and for our students. We seek to reveal, and argue for recognition of, the value of mobile criminology where walking and biography are combined to comprise an imaginative method and critical pedagogic tool that resonates with the Chicago school (sociology), especially the vital importance on studying lives over time, in context, and in process.

Notably, our mobile criminological approach is in line with work on mobilities (see Hannam et al., 2006; Grieco and Urry, 2011) and a growing recognition of walking studies (O’Neill and Roberts, 2019). As Sheller and Urry (2006) argue, walking allows for moving through familiar features under different conditions, thus allowing a place to be experienced in a distinct embodied, material, and through sociable dwelling in motion. Moving through spaces and places by walking enables participants to engage with ‘complex habitations, practices of dwelling, embodied relations, material presences, placings and hybrid subjectivities associated with movement through such spaces’ (Merriman, 2005: 154). Over time, a sense of spatial belonging, including buildings and landmarks passed, can come to reveal a ‘comforting reliability and mobile homeliness’ (Edensor, 2010: 70–71). Thus, we join the ranks of social scientists who recognise the value of mobility as a means of doing research and we introduce walking as a teaching method. The effectiveness of walking interviews in capturing lived lives, relating to people’s understanding of place, offers a profound insight into the landscapes the interviews take place in and can also shape discussion (see Evans and Jones, 2011). Subsequently, as Bates and Rhys-Taylor (2017) highlight, work on walking emphasises the value and significance of ‘the deductive insights delivered through ambulatory cognition’, which is concerned ‘with theorising the world through consideration of the everyday pedestrian practices of others’ (p. 1).

This is not to valorise walking methods above more traditional methods, such as archival searches and historical research with artefacts and the materialities associated with buildings, landmarks, and archaeological sites (Adey et al., 2014) undertaken through our collaboration with historians and museum curators. Rather, our methodological approach is grounded in expanding the ethnographic methods of Chicago sociologists (such as William Foot Whyte and W.I. Thomas), used most by cultural criminologists, cultural geographers, and social anthropologists (Ferrell et al., 2004; Lorimer, 2016) and we introduce not just walking, but biographical walking, as an imaginative and performative method. We adopt walking as ‘an embodied act’ (Lorimer, 2016: 19) figuring pedestrianism as a practice (Lee and Ingold, 2006), reflective of social forms and norms (Edensor, 2000) and expressive of cultural meanings (Lorimer and Lund, 2008). Walking is ‘more than just walking; it is often a highly sensual and complex activity’ (Fletcher and Platt, 2018: 211). We suggest that it can advance an understanding of lived experience and facilitate more sensuous and mobile ways of knowing and learning about crime, justice, and punishment. For the ‘centrality of movement to our knowledge of the world’ is a ‘useful way of thinking about what we might gain from learning on the move’ (Bates and Rhys-Taylor, 2017: 4). It is through ‘investigative’ wandering that we can ‘excavate histories and memories, bringing the past to life’ and enabling an engagement with the social world, allowing it to ask questions of us (Bates and Rhys-Taylor, 2017: 4). Biographical walking is an exercise in sociological attentiveness and a way of letting not just the sociological imagination (Mills, 2000 [1959]) but also the criminological imagination roam. But more than this, lives are lived in space and social life is spatially situated and experienced (Lefebvre, 1991). Hence we connect with criminology’s ‘spatial turn’ (Campbell, 2013). As Lefebvre (1991) illustrates, an over-emphasis on speech and writing in Western culture and society meant that space was overlooked. Moreover, Massey (2005) has argued that space must not be understood as a surface on which things happen, but rather as plural, inter-relational, polysemic; there can be no single vision or experience but a joining up of different pasts, presents, and indeed futures – a meeting of histories (see Massey, 1999; Seal and O’Neill, 2019).

We incorporate biography into walking and conduct a walking ‘interview’ with convict criminologist, David Honeywell, through the city of his youth. As he engages with urban space and the history embedded in the landmarks and buildings a creative, ethnographic attunement is enabled to both his life story of crime and deviance and to the histories of crime, justice, and punishment in urban space connected to his story, and the places or landmarks he visits along the way.

An increasing number of scholars over the past two decades have embraced telling biographical stories, life history, and narrative-based methods (Chamberlayne et al., 2000; Merrill and West, 2009; Miller, 2000b; O’Neill, 2020; Roberts, 2002). As such, we contribute to the growing momentum of the value of storytelling in social research, for as Walter Benjamin (2004: 378) argued, storytelling has a primary role in the household of humanity. Beyond the disciplinary boundaries of biographical sociology and criminology, there is a growing interest in narrative theorising. For Roberts (2002), telling our stories through narrative practices is an ‘artistic endeavour’ that enables us to ‘do’ coherence. Some narratives can help us, while others keep us passive and ‘separate people from the authenticity of their lives’ (Craib, 2003: 1). We resonate with Roberts’ (2002) argument that ultimately, ‘the intent of biographical research in its various guises is to collect and interpret the lives of others as part of human understanding’ (p. 15).

In adopting a biographical walking approach as a method, we transgress conventional and traditional ways of doing, analysing, and representing research data in criminology. In the process of the biographical walk with David Honeywell, we experienced his relationship to the space, time, and places he moved through in a physical embodied and affective way. This methodological approach also enabled the co-walkers to engage with the biographical walking relationally, critically, and reflectively through active listening to a life story in relation to landmarks, place, time, and space. This involved a corporeal, reflexive, and dialogic process of doing cultural research and analysis which addresses Mills’ argument from 1959 that the promise and challenge of sociology (and therefore also criminology) is to understand the relationship between ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues of the social structure’ the ‘intersections of biography and history within society (Mills, 2000 [1959]: 7–8). In addition, the walking biographical interview (O’Neill and Roberts, 2019) facilitated a dialectic of mutual recognition, and subject–subject relations, paced out along the ground. We suggest here, and later in the article, that this research process underpins and can support or facilitate the production of guided and self-guided research-led walks, designed to be a more democratic, participatory process of teaching and learning that forms an imaginative and critical pedagogy.

Hence, a crucial part of mobile criminology comprises combining biographical walking and storytelling, and draws on the participatory, sensory, action-oriented characteristics of urban walking as a social research methodology. Latin American sociologists Fals-Borda and Rahman (1991) reflect on the three key aspects a participatory methodology possesses:

This also connects with the aims of a ‘public criminology’, and by this we mean a criminology that is concerned with social problems and issues and develops critical criminological analysis that promotes ‘public reflection’ and public understanding. We also argue (in addition to points (1)–(3) above) that using a participatory approach, creates the space for collaboration, dialogue, and action, which is a production of ‘symmetrical communication’, indeed ‘symmetrical reciprocity’. In turn, this reinforces the need for dialogue and interpretation which leads to better knowledge and understanding of crime and justice in city spaces. Attention to rigour, validity, and ethical imperatives is also central to participatory research as a social and relational good.

Fals-Borda and Rahman’s (1991) argument for the value of participatory research resists the idea of the neoliberal lone academic producing research-led papers, for the research excellence framework (REF). It embraces the purpose of the criminological imagination to expand beyond disciplinary boundaries and challenge neoliberalisation of research by conducting deeply collaborative research that develops collective analysis, responses, and outcomes. In our criminological walking project, participatory methods, such as biographical walking and ethnographic walking, were supplemented by archival research, triangulated with that of historians, archivists, and curators, and enabled people in the team to both express their expertise and experience in collective and collaborative ways. This approach also fosters inclusion and this has enormous impact pedagogically through embodied learning. At the very least, participatory research methods can help highlight, reinforce, and support skills development. Inspired by Fals Borda and Rahman (1991), we argue that participatory and ethnographic research as a mobile criminology can empower, be inclusive, and transformative. Our experience of conducting participatory research, combining biographical with ethnographic walking-based research, which is inherently ‘sociable’ and indeed ‘convivial’, facilitated really positive outcomes for both public/non-student and student reflective learning and understanding.

For us, convivial research is not instrumental, it highlights interdependence, collective research, and is attuned to the relational and affective aspects of learning; it is also about creativity and the imagination. Ivan Illich’s (1973) definition of a convivial society is one where people are not slaves to tools, technology, or oppressive governance systems and where creativity and imagination are central. He critiques the deadening of the imagination via a focus on the acceleration of productivity and the engineering of satisfaction and consent as a threat to society. Instead, he offers tools for a convivial society, based upon similar principles to participatory research and the importance of ‘relational goods’ (Archer, 2015) as an outcome of research. The active listening and convivial, sociable tools that we place at the centre of our research-led crime walks, not only reinforce walking as a mobile, imaginative criminological method, but is also about doing convivial criminology. Participatory, convivial walking methods inform our criminological imaginations and spark criminological critique and analysis.

To evidence these key points, we introduce and discuss in the following section a biographical walk with David Honeywell, which laid a foundation for the development of a crime walk in the city of York (also drawing on a previously established crime walk in Durham city). Significantly, both crime walks were influenced by ethnography, storytelling, and biography as part of their design and development as pedagogical tools. Both criminological walks and the biographical walk provide evidence for the originality and significant contribution made by mobile criminology at a methodological and pedagogical level.

Biographical walking with David Honeywell: criminological research on the move

As we argue above, walking as a mobile method for doing and sharing research helps to engage and connect co-walkers with criminological ideas, concepts, and theories in convivial, sensory, and participatory ways. It allows for learning through engaged listening and corporeally experiencing the performative process of the walk. Walking as a biographical research method in criminology is a powerful route to understanding and interpreting the past in the present. The following short extracts from a biographical walk with convict criminologist David Honeywell, who as a former prisoner turned academic, merges his past with the present to provide a provocative insight into the history of crime, justice, and punishment in the city of York (Figure 1). In the excerpt we share, the discursive, reflexive, and relational aspects of walking connected to his life story, which also reveal his biographical trajectory in relational and material (social, structural, spatial, and cultural/relational) ways as well as his ‘temporal ordering and differentiation’ (Harrison, 2008: xxxiii) of his early life in York. This in turn helps us to see the sociological and criminological complexity and significance of his biography within the process of ‘being criminalised’ alongside issues of social justice and transgression. For as we know, when people are perceived as ‘out of place’ then the more normative assumptions governing spatial inclusion and exclusion become apparent (O’Neill, 2015; O’Neill and Hubbard, 2010; Roy, 2016; Truman and Springgay, 2018).

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Figure 1.

Map of the biographical walk. Image: David Honeywell.

The university, PhD, and a career in criminology

David started his biographical walk by choosing a route around York that included key spaces and places he identified as significant to his life and its intersection with crime and social justice. The walk with David was circular, starting at the university, before walking towards Tang Hall (an estate where he had lived as a 19-year-old with his mother, in the early 1980s, see Figure 2), down Hull road towards the city centre, then on to Mason’s Arms (his Grandad, Ernie’s local). Then on to Fishergate towards the city centre and the Merchant Adventurers Hall, passing Russell’s restaurant (where he worked as a cleaner as a young man) and then onto the Magistrates Court, where he had been sentenced. The route returned to the university via Fishergate, passing the Mason’s Arms again and heading towards the police station in Fulford, through the barracks (where his Grandad was stationed) back into the university grounds.

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Figure 2.

Tang Hall.

Beginnings: the biographical role and importance of the university

David Honeywell (2012) began the walk by talking about his book, Never Ending Circles, which was inspired by the political debates following the 2011 riots about ‘broken Britain’, dysfunctional families, and a lack of parental guidance and community role models. He realised that what commentators were talking about was what he experienced 30 years earlier and he began to pen his journey through times of austerity. His experiences of desistance led him to study for a PhD examining the role of prison education in the desistance narratives of former prisoners. He also found himself with many unanswered questions such as why after achieving two degrees was he still unemployable? What had he actually to do before he was allowed to be a ‘proper person’ with a place in society’? He thought he was the only person to be experiencing this until discovering the Convict Criminology Organisation, which seeks to integrate their past and present identities (see Jones et al., 2009) and Maruna’s (2001) work on self-narratives and the reconstruction and deconstruction of identities among desisters.

David said it was important to start his walk by talking about the university and its role in his life and life story:

The university means everything because it’s helped me transform my whole life, it’s made me feel like I’m a proper person from just an ex-con to somebody who has actually got a position in life. I always use my background in my teaching because it’s always relevant somewhere.

He talks about his move from Teesside and that the family wanted a change as Middlesbrough was becoming quite depressed in the Thatcher years, due to austerity and unemployment:

We went for a house swap and came here. I’ve got a sister as well but she’d moved out. I’d be nineteen, I’d just come out of the army. I was seventeen when I went in. I wasn’t in very long but I joined as a boy soldier. It was a time when a lot of lads were joining the army because of unemployment, so there was a lot of lads joining up to get away, to get a job and get away from the place.

David transgressed the rules as a young conscript and was sent to the ‘glasshouse’ as a ‘prisoner’. ‘So that was when I got my first taste of being locked up – in the army glasshouse’:

I used to go absent without leave a lot. I don’t know what was wrong, well I do know what was wrong with me, but I don’t know what it was I thought I’d achieve. I used to run home. It was like I was homesick and I’d spend a few days at home and then I’d go and hand myself in . . .

We were on Thief Lane at this point and in front of The Retreat – a charity and specialist mental healthcare service where David says he was treated for depression.

Return to Tang Hall

He reflected that:

So this is the first time I’ve ever been back. Mother moved back to Middlesbrough about 18 months after I was arrested.

As we were walking down Hull Road, David was looking for his old house and the off licence where he had committed his first offence: So this is Arthur Street, Oh, the off licence is somebody’s house now, I think that’s it, but it is so long ago:

I’m glad I’ve come back because it makes the bad memories into nicer memories. I used to walk round here to this shop. So, this used to be a newspaper shop. And it was run by two men. I became good friends with them and they sent me a big parcel of chocolate into prison, it was Christmas time. That really impacted on me. I used to walk round the corner and I used to go running in that park there.

I used to go jogging. I discovered jogging was good for my mental health when I was fifteen and I’ve done it ever since. Yes, but one thing you don’t get now, which I distinctly remember, is that you could smell the chocolate from Terrys and Rowntree’s factories. And all my relatives in the past have worked in at least one of them.

At this point we approached a restaurant (see Figure 3).

This Restaurant used to be a pub called the Spotted Cow and that was where I spent the night before I went and did that robbery. Well it wasn’t a robbery, it was classed as a robbery, and I was charged with robbery, even though I didn’t actually rob anything. I’m not sure why but regardless of what it was called, I was sentenced to youth custody, which was okay considering I scared someone.

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Figure 3.

Restaurant, formerly the Spotted Cow.

David was sentenced to Durham prison and on release he returned to York:

Yes, before I came back I’d moved to Salisbury with my uncle who had just lost his wife so I went to keep him company basically and he suggested I go round the hotels and try and pick up a job. So I did, I got a job as a washer-upper and when I came back. I was a washer-upper.

Crime, desistance, and moving on: Magistrates Court

The hotel was called the Crest Hotel (now the Hilton) when I worked there. It was one of my first washer-upper jobs. So, I would have been there 1988–1989. So this is my second stint in York now after I’ve done my time in prison and I’m looking for a job and trying to earn a living.

Well I made my first appearance in 1983 because that’s when they referred me to Crown Court from here (Figure 4) and I was back again in 1988 for smashing that window I showed you earlier, the Spotted Cow Pub and that was when I met my first girlfriend but it’s not when we first met as I worked with her in that hotel round the corner.

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Figure 4.

Entrance to York Magistrates Court.

At this point we meet some students who say hello. When they leave, after telling him their plans for the coming year, he says:

I always feel proud, you were asking about the students earlier, I always feel proud knowing that I’ve helped people achieve a degree, that I’ve been part of that journey.

David went on to talk about his time in prison:

Because I was under twenty-one I was sent to an under twenty-one’s remand centre. Which was just for young men, now it’s become a Category C adult male prison. Over there is the County Court (Figure 5).

We’re just heading for Fulford now. That is where my granddad was based, he was in the army for thirty years and he even worked at the Military Museum in his seventies, he never left the army really. He worked at Imphal Barracks where we’re going now.

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Figure 5.

County Court.

Walking back towards the university, police station, and barracks

As we head back towards the university past the police station and barracks, David reflects:

My mother used to say, when she used to visit me in jail, that when she used to leave the prison, she’d see students studying and wished I was one of them, instead of where I was.

Yes and then she got her wish.

Yes, (pointing to the Police Station) and that’s where I was arrested and locked up.

He also notes that the Army is a significant feature of his family history (as we approached the barracks, Figure 6).

I often feel like I’ve let my family down because they all had excellent military records and I went and got kicked out after a year. So we’re coming up to the barracks now.

My granddad was always in the Second Battalion and he was on the Somme, he fought on the Somme. He was a boy soldier and he lied to get in the army because he was adopted so he had a choice of becoming a servant or enlisting and he chose the army. He went to the Somme at fifteen. And then during World War II he was a warden here. So, when my granddad used to go to the mess when he was working in the museum and he was seventy then which was in the barracks there, and he used to go to the mess which is where you know where you eat your food, all the young soldiers used to part to let him walk through.

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Figure 6.

Walking through the barracks.

Back at the university, we discussed the importance of the sociology of crime and deviance and the criminological legacy of key theorists and the Birmingham School for cultural studies:

Yes and I’ve really enjoyed today, it’s been a real timeline hasn’t it and this is the most important part of the journey here today at the University. Sometimes I have to pinch myself when I think of my journey from where I came from to now working in one of the best Universities. I’d have never believed someone like me could have ever been welcomed within such a place.

The convivial methods were writ large in David’s biographical walk. Walking along the route, other landmarks and sites cropped up that elicited memories that also became part of the story and David added these to his map, which evolved and ultimately became the route of the York crime walk as a critical pedagogic walk (Figure 7).

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Figure 7.

Crime walk map.

Critical pedagogy and crime walks as mobile criminology

Following the biographical walk with David (and drawing on O’Neill and Hill’s prior experience in designing and running a crime walk in Durham), the authors discussed how the use of storytelling and biography could be used as a critical pedagogy for criminology. There was a desire to go beyond existing walking tours such as Invisible Cities (Edinburgh, York, Manchester, Glasgow and Cardiff), ¹ where tour routes are chosen by those who have been affected by homelessness, or ghost walks (which appear across the UK in many cities and towns), or sensationalist crimes (e.g. Jack the Ripper Tours in London). Instead the desire was to inspire a research led criminological imagination amongst university students and the wider public via mobile criminology. Committed to creating a crime walk which was beyond entertainment, engaged with the spatial, with landmarks through a critical pedagogy, we wanted to draw on key criminological theories and concepts along with the history of crime, justice, and punishment that could be engaged with by walkers in participatory and convivial ways. The intention was to design and launch a multi-layered learning and teaching tool using a website and podcasts along with providing access to academic publications and archival records for those wishing to delve deeper. The aim was to avoid a spectacularisation of criminal and deviant acts, instead focusing more on the everyday nature of crime and justice embedded in landmarks, sites, and buildings and also to draw on Debord’s (2008) 1955 notion of psychogeography, whereby walker’s emotions and behaviour are effected by the geographical environment (see Richardson, 2015; Smith, 2010).

O’Neill and Penfold-Mounce gathered a team (Honeywell, Coward, and Crowther) comprised of an academic, doctoral candidates, and an undergraduate student (who successfully applied for a paid internship on the project), to design and launch a crime walk in the city of York. The team were recruited on the basis of sharing the aim to embrace a participatory, convivial mobile criminology as a research method and pedagogical tool. Drawing on the biographical walking route in York, a crime walk connecting and relating landmarks to the history of crime, justice, and punishment from medieval times to the current day was developed. The York crime walk (built on O’Neill and Hill’s experience of a pedagogical crime walk in Durham) was specifically designed as a research-led critical pedagogical mobile method to introduce students and the public to criminology in embodied, performative, participatory, and convivial ways. Notably, since the launch of these city-based walks, they have become favourite topics at university recruitment events and open days, in Level 1 teaching and at public engagement festivals by capturing the imagination and facilitating critical criminological pedagogy.

The York crime walk was developed in two distinct phases. Phase one included planning, discussing, sharing, and operationalising our creative ideas. The approach was from the outset participatory and inclusive connecting our wide ranging research interests and working with curators and archivists at the city museum. There was also repeated ethnographic walking in York (as had been conducted in Durham) inspired by the biographical walk with David to include landmarks, spaces, and places which would aid the critical pedagogic purpose of relating to and learning about crime, justice, and punishment through time and in space/place. In both cities the crime walks take up to 2 hours depending on the time taken to stop and reflect upon each landmark. It should also be noted that both walks are accessible to people with disabilities and the York city map and podcasts can be accessed remotely through the website if the walk cannot be undertaken in person. Phase two of the process entailed first, a launch of the York city crime walk at the York Festival of Ideas a public engagement festival. Second, the integration of the York walk into university undergraduate modules and open days (as had been achieved in Durham) highlighting the skills they are using and how these will support them in their approach to learning as critical and mobile criminological pedagogy. What became apparent in the process of developing these walks is the role and importance of storytelling (see O’Neill, 2015; O’Neill and McHugh, 2017; Presser and Sandberg, 2015). It was the biographical rememberings of David, as he told his life in process that inspired the York crime walk, as well as the additional stories that residents told of the spaces and landmarks in their city during the launch of the walks, where guided walks with the public were conducted by the research team and undergraduate student volunteers.

Both the crime walks were built upon extensive scholarship in criminology and the desire to incorporate innovative embodied learning in the practice of teaching in the following ways. First, walking is a helpful method to convivially introduce people to the history of crime, justice, and punishment and inequality in ways they will remember, because learning while walking is embodied, engages the body, senses, and the mind. Second, students (and also the public who can access the walk online) are introduced to criminology through mobile methods and staff research interests which both opens and facilitates space for them to develop their own criminological imagination and understanding of issues, theories, and concepts in criminology. Third, both crime walks add to the rich pedagogic literature on learning through doing and promote critical pedagogy via active learning. Taking a walk through the city, engaging with buildings, places, and spaces, introduces co-walkers to the critical recovery of the histories of crime, justice, and punishment supported by archival work, historical literature, biographical material, and criminological theories. Fourth and finally, walking is an experiential methodology and a powerful way of communicating about experiences and ways of knowing across cultural divides. It also focuses attention on the sensory, kinaesthetic, mobile dimensions of lived experience which unites the visual with other senses. We submit that through walking as a critical pedagogy, we are able to get in touch with the past, present, and future of crime, justice, and punishment in ways that foster understanding and critical reflection in convivial ways; but more than this the crime walks stimulate the criminological imagination.

Mobile criminology has evolved beyond just being a participatory, convivial, biographical walking method within cultural criminology. For our teaching and learning practice, walking has become a critical pedagogical method via the two crime walks, one in Durham and the other in York. It embodies a catalyst for the criminological imagination that benefits from the participatory and convivial characteristics of walking as a method. It is not just walkers that benefit from mobile criminology but the researchers themselves. Reflecting on the design and process of the crime walks in both cities the two research teams agreed that we related to these urban spaces in new and unforgettable ways, particularly as our knowledge of the histories in the present were imprinted on our criminological sensibility and memory, in sensory and kinaesthetic ways. The stories we uncovered were etched into our memories through the places and indeed smells on the York crime walk – in the arches at the site of St Leonards Hospital and the place where the women’s prison was located in the now Castle museum – the temperature, dankness, and size of the spaces symbolising the lives and deaths of the men, women, and children who were confined within them. In developing walking as a mobile criminology, we argue here that as a critical pedagogical tool the crime walks benefit from the adoption of a convivial and participatory approach. Underpinned by action-oriented interventions, the outcome of our research was the two walks and the valuing of voices through time and in space/place found in archival material and artefacts. The methodological approach adopted as a mobile criminology is inspired by Chicago sociology, highlighting the importance of mobility, the spatial turn in criminology, biography, ethnography, history and the imagination, and how this can feed into pedagogic practice.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed the importance of developing an imaginative and convivial mobile criminology using walking as a research method and as a critical pedagogic tool for teaching and learning criminology within and outside the walls of academia. Our work is informed by the ethnographic and biographical research of Chicago school sociologists, as well as cultural, critical, and narrative criminology. In this article, we combine biography with walking to form a creative, performative methodology that offers a mobile, critical, cultural criminology for the 21st century and how biographical storytelling (with David Honeywell) inspired a crime walk in York as a critical pedagogy.

Here, we return to Mills (2000 [1959]), Barton et al (2007), Carlen (1985, 2010), and Young (2011), and the importance of imaginative criminology (Seal and O’Neill, 2019) and the relationship between private trouble and public issues – in doing critical analytic work on social issues, social harms, crime, and justice. The walk with David Honeywell evidences the theory and practice of mobile criminology for understanding, knowing, and explaining (critically analysing) the relationship between the lived experiences of a life in process and wider sociological and criminological analysis. The walk facilitated the ‘revelation of significant turning point moments’ in David’s life. It was these insights that informed the development of the York crime walk from an initial route map to a ‘pedagogical tool’ which supports an important point, that ‘auto/biography is to be seen as an inextricable part of the social with its own powers of illumination’ (McGarry and Keating, 2015: 15). In David’s case, both personally and pedagogically, he reflects that ‘doing biographical criminological research can sometimes be painful, particularly when the researcher draws from their past lived experiences as part of their methodology’. But equally the experiential can evoke a critical imagination for, and with, students and members of the public.

In adopting mobile methods for crime walks in Durham and York, to engage the criminological imagination we reveal issues of gender, race, and social class – social and political issues, the crimes of the powerful and performative convivial practices and processes for understanding crime and criminal justice, as well as the importance of drawing on history and biography. Through the York crime walk we explore important questions for teaching, researching, and engaging with criminology such as how do some things get defined as crime and others not?; for example, David’s stay in the glasshouse for ‘running away’. The troubles he experienced as a young man are markers of the social and individual life he was leading as a working-class youth, the way he was marked and treated as a working-class young man, the psycho-social entanglement of family history, relationships (especially with his grandfather), and to what extent prison ‘worked’ for him. His own PhD research on desistance and prison education is instructive here, as well as his autoethnographic research (Honeywell, 2015, 2018).

Notably, biographical walking provided two critical and cultural pedagogical moments for the mobile criminology we created. Through a biographical research methodology, the process of connecting and relating to David’s life history and the landmarks in both cities, helped develop an understanding of the history of crime, justice, and punishment from medieval times to the current day in the social, political, material, and historical contexts. As a research method on the move, it facilitated the development of a crime walk as a mode of teaching and learning, which can be used by students, to introduce them in participatory and convivial ways to the theories and concepts in criminology and the micro stories embedded in criminological sites. As this article has demonstrated, the potential impact of our approach upon criminological teaching and learning, inspired by Chicago sociology, through a mobile and critical imaginative pedagogy is far-reaching. The impacts of these walks on students have resulted in students taking a more active and participatory role by further developing the content.

Finally, through this mobile criminology we have been able to facilitate connections between historically embedded and current cultural and social issues, (for example, individuals have been and continue to be punished because of their gender, race, and social class) and social, material, and cultural theory and analysis. Thus, enabling a criminological experience, with its legacy in the Chicago school, in which researchers and students can connect biography to social structures and history and develop their own criminological imaginations. We need imaginative convivial mobile criminologies to pedagogically facilitate a radical cultural criminology into the 21st century, to stimulate our critical criminological imaginations and our practices (praxis) as educators, writers, and researchers and hopefully in transformative ways.

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