Editorial

As we begin the next phase of Crime Media Culture’s journey, we celebrate the extraordinary efforts of the founding editors and the editors we follow. Under the stewardship of Jeff Ferrell, Chris Greer, Yvonne Jewkes, and then Mark Hamm, the journal has very quickly established itself as the site of an exciting intellectual project. CMC’s existence was never guaranteed. Through hard work and challenging decisions, the editorship and our reviewers have established a fertile space for innovative thought and dialogue on the intersection of crime, criminal justice, and cultural inquiry—relationships and interconnections that require unending exploration. From the opening editorial, the ‘hope’ was expressed that the journal ‘will become the primary vehicle for exchange between scholars working at the intersections of criminological and cultural inquiry’ (Ferrell et al., 2005: 5). This distinctive intellectual vision has helped define a new interdisciplinary field and promote international exchange. We are honored to be taking on the role of co-editors and we look forward to doing our intellectual best to continue this foundational labor and extend the journal’s accomplishments into the next decade.

Growth necessarily means maintaining a firm commitment to these origins, while broadening our readership, keeping our finger on the pulse of where the field(s) is (are) going. We recognize that this is a tension to be carefully navigated, between “tradition and trendiness,” rigor and innovation. It is also a space that depends upon where we are in the current moment. The contemporary mediascape requires historicization and contextualization through forces of neoliberalism, globalization, and recurrent inequalities, ideologies, and flashpoints of resistance. It is no longer enough to interpret a single film or television show without situating it within these larger forces as well as complex media interfaces and modes of production, larger information and image flows. As media scholar John Hartley (2012) insists, cultural studies is no longer a field where reading after reading of texts accumulates to no particular end; rather, the ends—and they are many—have become the primary questions.

The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale of images and their distribution leave us speechless and in need of both old and new theories and methods, a refinement of concepts and tools as well as innovative new ones to tackle questions of crime, harm, culture, and control. Keywords such as image, iconography, information flows, the counter-visual, and “social” media, as well as the continuing relevance of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality, class in cultural contests, mark the contours of our future. Such a scene insists that we must revisit the methods by which we historically and currently analyze, interpret, and engage with culture in criminology, while highlighting ways in which to expand these methodologies.

It is clear that the journal has been at pains to “break down the often rigid and increasingly disciplinised boundaries of mainstream criminology, media and communication studies, and cultural studies” (Greer and Hamm, 2010: 5, emphasis in original), and this ambition remains an important one. It is not enough to ask what criminology brings to the study of crime, media, and culture. It is also a question of what work has been done that precedes and occurs alongside of us—that deepens our analysis and our understandings of our subject, our potential, our challenges, and our limits.

Such pursuits are exciting and unprecedented in their possibilities. The journal has already published work spanning a variety of media and artistic modes, such as photodocumentary, photoethnography, film, television, new media, social media, music, interactive documentary, architecture, data visualizations, design, performance art, conceptual art, mixed media, theater, embodiment, spatialization, surveillance and aerial/satellite/drone technology, social documentary, graffiti and urban aesthetics, ruins, memorials, models, exhibitions, and imaginative interventions to envision crime and punishment otherwise. Within all of this, there is a continuing story of agency and injustice, of making sense of the world—its harms, its intensified control and surveillance, its resurgent resistance, transgressiveness, and claims for justice—so as to act within it. While new and unanticipated state, corporate, and interpersonal harms continue to be the darker side of this formation, we might also see our mandate as one that looks to the study of how social actors are themselves using crime, media, culture to meet their own ends—to interpret the world and their actions in new ways: From Ferguson, Missouri, to Hong Kong, to the “Arab Spring,” the complex hopes and disappointments of alternative projects of self and collective knowledge promote new forms of social action and political goals. In this context, we reiterate the three substantive areas of interest for the journal:

It is also worth emphasizing that the journal represents a truly collective project, relying on the scholarship of contributors, reviewers, and board members. To this end, we invite our stalwart core, leading experts in criminology, and our emergent junior colleagues to contribute. We encourage them to pursue both refinement and innovation. We send a special invitation to authors from beyond criminology who might inform and join our discussion. We seek a more truly international presence, and invite authors and reviewers from the global south and east. We hope for the best work we can produce and look forward to a second decade at CMC.