Abstract
Ghost criminology, as both a field and a book, is “concerned with a dis-ease of temporality” (Fiddler et al., 2022: 15). It explores haunted spaces, times, people, and processes—as well as how we might move through and shed light on these as researchers. This impressive anthology tackles questions of how can we see the hitherto unseen, how disjointed time can be studied and understood, and what insights might hide within what seems to be a lack at first glance.
The book calls for more critical engagements with both criminological fields of enquiry and with how we, as criminologists, might be complicit in reaffirming or reproducing harmful views and ways of knowledge production. In this sense, it has a lot of common ground with intersectional, feminist calls for in-depth, critical research. What this book adds to this fairly established call, however, is its heightened focus on the temporal aspects of social life and its inequalities, injustices, and violences. Throughout the book, time is an analytical concept that lingers, jumps, fragments, and coalesces. The book’s attentiveness to time as an often overlooked yet foundational aspect of harm brings a more fluid understanding of temporality to the table than what is commonly found in studies dealing with histories, timelines, life scripts, or other linearly conceived concepts of time. Importantly, time and the experiences thereof should not be confused with history in the traditional sense—even though processes of (re)writing history are one aspect of social temporalities. Rather, Ghost Criminology treats time as a past, future, present, and in-between component of social life. With this in mind, explores the spaces and social moments where time is out of joint. In this way, the book attempts to “reckon with the things behind the things,” the (in)visible, the lingering past, and the threatening future (Fiddler et al., 2022: 17).
The three main themes of the book deal with (i) apparitions and the (in)visible, (ii) the necrotic and (in)corporeal, and (iii) dead and haunted spaces. One thing these themes have in common is that across them, chapters bring questions of atmosphere to the fore in different ways. For instance, McKay explores how we can capture the atmosphere of a place that is defined both by the specific harms it has experienced and by its mundane ordinariness (McKay, 2022). Meanwhile, Young’s chapter considers how we can approach and understand spaces where the atmosphere is haunted by lingering, violent disappearances, and where we might find ourselves out of place (or time) in the process of studying them (Young, 2022). The book also discusses how atmospheres of (un)rest are socially created, protected, or resisted based on what might (come to) haunt them (Campbell, 2022; Robins, 2022); how harmful state practices invoke ghosts and create atmospheres tinged with disorientation and obfuscation (Biber, 2022); and how residual traces of what excluded people have left behind can teach us to see the presence of enforced absence (Ferrell, 2022). For many of these explorations, the answer seems to lie in seeing the unseen, or seeing what we think we know in new ways. This actualizes one of the core themes of the book: the importance of exorcising criminology’s own ghosts. By both tracing the discipline’s history and interrogating its present, ghost criminology (as a book as well as a field of enquiry) shines a light under the bed of conventional criminological thought. In Brown’s chapter especially, the book engages with some of the white supremacist pasts, presents, and futures haunting criminology and criminal justice such as they stand today. Convincingly, Brown (2022) argues that among the “many ghosts in the archive of criminology,” the one that most “demands exorcism” is that of white supremacy (p. 95). How, and what, we see as criminologically relevant (as well as criminal) needs to be reevaluated with this in mind, which is a perpetual, and important, project for the future of criminology—ghostly or otherwise.
Since a creative book encourages creative associations, I would like to tie Brown’s chapter on white supremacy to another of the book’s overarching approaches to examining (in)visibilities and social (un)desirability. Campbell discusses how criminal Otherness both coexists with and is made opposite to normative Sameness, and how these traits can be navigated and inscribed on the same body. Meanwhile, Robins discusses the practice of burying similarly monsterized Others at sea, and how this practice leaves them scattered, without a final resting place that would tie them to a specific location. Supposedly, this keeps such monstrous presences safely away from the (solid and social) grounds their presence might otherwise haunt. Here, land and sea are used as a kind of dichotomy. Thus, places on land can be made safer if the socially polluting ashes of the unwanted dead are dissolved in the sea. However, what this discussion stops short of is how dissolving our perceived evils in the sea effectively immerses us all in them, as well. Considering the atmospheric, permeating movements of water through rains, fogs, or even floods, our bodies and large bodies of water are perhaps not as separate as we like to imagine. These immersive qualities of water resonate with how several chapters of the book, in different ways, note how monster-hunting can turn us into monsters. As such, the book seems to suggest that haunting questions of what dangers lurk in the depths of the (sociological) sea can be at least partially answered by viewing our own reflection in the water.
Ghost Criminology’s approach to research is creative and at times even artistic. More often than not, the chapters use empirical examples to illustrate theoretical concepts, rather than employing theories to explain data sets. Moreover, the collection adds new nuances to research methods in ethnography and media studies, focusing on processes of (dis)appearance. As such, the book has a novel approach to knowledge production that balances right on the edge of playfulness while remaining attentive to the seriousness of its subject matter. Read in this light, Ghost Criminology is as much about doing criminology in new and creative ways as it is about (new and old) topics of criminological interest. As such, the book promises an inspiring read regarding both the hows and the whats of contemporary criminology.