‘No one wins. One side just loses more slowly’: The Wire and drug policy

The Australian news media regularly presents crystal methamphetamine use as a non-metropolitan ‘epidemic’ sweeping through country towns with devastating consequences for affected communities. Considerations of place and the notion of rurality are therefore crucial to understanding how these media representations are constructed and their power to influence national understandings of rural people, places and policy debates. In order to explore these complexities, we apply Simon Cottle’s ‘communicative architecture of television’ methodology to an analysis of three long-form reportage television programmes on the theme of ice use in small Australian towns. Theories of ‘social imaginaries’ inform the argument that a distinctive Australian ‘agrarian imaginary’ can be discerned through the reporting’s strong associations with the connections and contradictions attached to ideas and emotions about ‘the bush’. The television programmes draw on what Cottle terms ‘mythic’ and ‘collective’ frames that reach into the cultural reservoirs of communities to reinforce national perceptions, values and narratives about how rural communities ought to be, and by extension, how they ought to deal with complex social problems, such as illicit drug distribution and use.

Section: Australia’s Rural Ice Epidemic: Real or Imagined?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ice towns: Television representations of crystal methamphetamine use in rural Australia

Waller

Clifford

2019

“…Popular criminology has since been applied to a range of subjects including fictional films, music and television (e.g. Kohm, Bookman and Greenhill, 2017; Rockell, 2009; Rothe and Collins, 2013; Wakeman, 2014). To date, popular criminological analysis has tended to focus on criminality and the aetiology of crime rather than on issues of justice.…”

Section: Cultural and Popular Criminologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Carceral violence at the intersection of madness and crime inBatman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City

Fawcett

Kohm

2019

The action-adventure video games Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009) and Batman: Arkham City (2011) draw on familiar comic book narratives, themes and characters to situate players in a world of participatory violence, crime and madness. In the first game, the player-as-Batman is situated in Arkham Asylum, a high-security facility for the criminally insane and supervillains that also temporarily houses a general population of prisoners from Blackgate Penitentiary. The elision of criminality and mental illness becomes amplified in the second game with the establishment of Arkham City, a combined facility that conflates asylum and prison, completely dissolving any distinction between crime and madness. We draw on Rafter’s conceptual framework of popular criminology to seriously interrogate the representation of violence, crime and madness in these games. More than simply texts offering popular explanations for crime, the games directly implicate the player in violence enacted upon the bodies of criminals and patients alike. Violence is necessary to move the action of the game forward and evokes a range of emotional responses from players who draw from personal experience and other cultural and media representations as they navigate the game. We argue that while the game celebrates violence and the brutal conditions of incarceration, it also offers possibilities for subversive and critical readings. While working to affirm assumptions about crime and mental illness, the game also provides a visceral and visual critique of excessive punishment by the state as a source of injustice for those deemed mad or bad.

“…In this article, we set out to explore the vanguard of serialized true crime podcasts through an ultrarealist lens in the social and cultural context of late capitalism, and reflect upon their significance for academic criminology. The podcasts gave the appearance of both reproducing and challenging mainstream, hegemonic and taken for granted ideas about crime (Wakeman, 2014). They engaged with the themes currently being explored by the academy's zemiologists, ultra-realists and cultural and critical criminologists.…”

Section: Conclusion: Popular Criminology's Wake Up Call For the Academymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many of these studies identify the multiple forces driving selective criminalization and emphasize the importance of the cultural and social context in which media portrayals are created and maintained (see for example Barak, 1994;Cohen, 1972;Fishman and Cavender, 1998;Green, 2000;Hall et al, 1978;Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994). Criminological study has moved beyond the traditional positivism of treating crime and its representation as separate and discrete to acknowledging that the representations are themselves locales of knowledge, sites where meanings are performed and challenged (Carrabine, 2008;Wakeman, 2014). Rafter and colleagues (Rafter, 2007;Rafter and Brown, 2011) argue that media representations of crime are best understood by the term popular criminology, which is defined as 'a category composed of discourses about crime found not only in film but also on the internet, on television and in newspapers, novels, rap music and myth' (Rafter, 2007: 415).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forever trapped in the imaginary of late capitalism? The serialized true crime podcast as a wake-up call in times of criminological slumber

Yardley

Kelly

Robinson-Edwards

2018

Within this article, we explore the emergence of the serialized true crime podcast through an ultra-realist lens. These representations have become increasingly popular in recent years and appear to embody changing sensibilities towards crime and criminal justice – we critically consider whether serialized true crime podcasts do or could represent a change from the true crime of the past. More importantly, we question the extent to which academic criminology is equipped to engage in critical analysis of this media and address the questions that they raise about crime and society’s response to it in late capitalist society.