12.2 – Cultural Criminology – A Day in the Life

6:45 AM. The clock radio was blaring the closing notes of some banal pop song from the 1980s when the announcer chimed in with the daily news and weather. It was going to be a hot one today—34 degrees Celsius and it wasn’t yet June! The announcer made a quip about global warming before moving on to the traffic report. Gridlock on Portage Avenue due to a protest in front of RCMP headquarters. The discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at a former residential school had been in the news this week. I wonder if this protest was related to that? It also made me think about the red dress hanging in my neighbour’s front yard [Figure 12.3]. I made a mental note to avoid Portage Avenue on my morning commute downtown.

 I switched off the radio, but before my feet could hit the floor I picked up my phone and upon recognising my face, the device unlocked, revealing a dozen unread emails. I quickly scrolled through to see if anything was urgent. The first message screamed in all-caps: WINNER!!!!!!! CLAIM YOURE FREE iPhone 17 Now!!  I quickly swiped that message and several more like it in to the trash before concluding there wasn’t anything important to deal with.

 

After a quick shower and coffee, I punched the code into the alarm keypad by the front door, arming the system before heading to the garage for my bike. I gave the tires a quick squeeze to ensure they were fully inflated and checked to make sure my Abus Granit XPlus™ bike lock was secured in its holster. I marvelled at how heavy it was, and I recalled watching a YouTube video showing the same type of lock being cut with an angle grinder. The lock could be defeated, but it would take some time. Surely a thief would pass my bike over in favour of easier prey?I cycled down the back alley and noticed some new graffiti on a dumpster behind an apartment complex. I was trying to decipher the colourful letters when I almost collided with a man pushing a shopping cart. The cart was filled with cans and bottles and all sorts of metal odds and ends. Before I could mutter an apology for nearly running into the man, I heard shouts and I looked to see a uniformed security guard running from the apartment complex gesturing at the man with the cart. I decided to keep riding and ignore the ruckus.

 

A bit farther along my ride, I noticed several tarps and tents strung up under a highway overpass, and I wondered who might be living there. I also noticed the colourful mural dedicated to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls on the side abutment of the overpass. While reading the names of the women depicted in the mural, I saw that someone had added a new graffiti tag on the overpass that read “FUCK BANKS.” The whole scene made me feel uneasy, and I quickly pedaled away [Figure 12.4].

Part of my commute to work follows a bike lane along a busy stretch of road downtown. Aside from a white line of paint on the asphalt, nothing separates cars from cyclists and I felt a bit nervous, especially at intersections where cars sometimes turn in front of me without looking. Sometimes drivers even yell and make threatening gestures or cut me off in traffic [Figure 12.5]. Today, a car pulled into the bike lane and stopped suddenly in front of me. I braked hard to avoid a collision and looked on incredulously as a well-dressed man stepped out of the car without seeing me. “What the hell?” I shouted angrily, gesturing toward the no parking signs. “Fuck you!” he replied, and all of a sudden he reached into his car and produced a tire iron. I quickly pushed my bike up onto the sidewalk and pedalled hard past the scene. My heart was pounding and I was shaking just a bit.

“Just another fucking Monday.” I muttered to myself as I made the rest of my way to work.

 

The vignette in Textbox 12.2 above is meant to illustrate how everyday moments contain within them opportunities to think about how crime and control are woven into our daily lives, as well as the way power is both exercised and resisted from below in late modern life. It also shows how crime and control play out through moments embedded in culture. Take a moment to think about the range of crimes implied by this anecdote. Everything from minor graffiti and the pilfering of scrap metal, to online fraud, to state-sponsored acts of murder and colonial genocide all weave their way in and out of our everyday culture, as do acts of resistance to the exercise of control. Individuals with power and privilege can rely on private security and home alarm systems for protection, while those who are unhoused are vulnerable to exploitation and criminalisation for engaging in acts of survival. Conflicts between motorists and cyclists boil over into violent confrontation, and protests take the form of traffic blockades, pop-up art installations and guerilla graffiti aiming to subvert government messaging. Imagine your own day and think about how crime and justice weave seamlessly into your own lives and into culture.

For students trained in social science, this sort of criminology of the everyday may not seem like a method of analysis at all. However, cultural criminology reaches back into the history of the discipline to reclaim earlier approaches to studying crime. Looking to the origin of the discipline, we can see that “many of criminology’s foundational works emerged out of an idiosyncratic, impressionistic approach to ethnographic inquiry” (Ferrell, 2004, p. 295). Regarded as the intellectual foundation of American criminology, the Chicago School of Sociology in the early twentieth century epitomised this idiosyncratic approach.  Chicago School sociologists undertook their research far from their university offices and viewed the city as an unknown territory ripe for scholarly investigation. They used a form of field research adapted from anthropology called ethnography that involved long-term interaction and the observation of cultural groups in their natural settings, adapted from anthropology called ethnography to study unconventional groups and behaviours found throughout the city—from Depression-era hobos (Anderson, 1923) to juvenile delinquents (Shaw, 1930). Frederic Thrasher spent seven years undertaking immersive field research before writing his 571-page book The Gang (1927). Robert Park, a leading figure of the Chicago School, was a former newspaper reporter and used a similar approach to gathering stories from those living in the city. These rich, detailed and experiential accounts of human behaviour nowadays seem almost romantic and hardly resemble contemporary academic criminology. Also, it seems incredibly impractical to spend seven years on field research. Can these approaches be updated and modernised for late modern times when the world appears to be moving faster and faster?

In answer, cultural criminologists propose that researchers engage in instant ethnography—an approach that recognises that late modern life unfolds in unpredictable and haphazard ways.^[1] Researchers can gain important insights into crime and control by observing these fleeting moments which appear when researchers take the time to simply look around. As the opening anecdote illustrates, keeping our eyes open to the way crime and control seeps into our day-to-day culture can provide insight lacking in more traditional and planned approaches. Cultural criminology celebrates and uses the unpredictability of late modern life to analyse and offer social and political critique about crime and control. Take a few moments to look around your world today. You may be surprised at what you see.

Because of cultural criminology’s focus on the everyday experiences of crime and control—the visceral feelings associated with crime and punishment—some have adopted methods of analysis to investigate how these experiences play out through the senses—sight, sound, touch, taste and smell (McClanahan and South, 2020). Criminology, like most social sciences, prioritises visual evidence over other ways of understanding the social world. To counter this, cultural criminologists use other sensory data and approaches in their work. For example, Linnemann and Turner (2022) analyze how sound waves are weaponised by police when they use the LRAD sound cannon to disperse protesters. Other senses come into play during protests as well. Imagine the sting of pepper spray in your eyes followed by momentary blindness and the sound of riot police approaching, beating their batons in unison against riot shields. Cultural criminology tries to understand how protests play out through all the senses (Young and Popovsky, 2024). Russell and Carlton (2020) explain how protesters in Australia used sound to penetrate the walls of prisons to communicate solidarity with inmates on the inside. Prisons are themselves multisensory environments, and both prisoners and corrections officers experience the environment through all their senses. For example, prisoners are served bland repetitive diets. Is this a form of sensory punishment? Herrity, Schmidt, and Warr (2021) explore what they call sensory penalties—meaning the way punishment happens via all the senses. Take a moment to think about how sight, sound, touch, taste and smell might heighten the punishment experienced by prisoners. Listen to Kate Herrity and Jason Warr’s podcast “The Impact of Sound, Touch and Smell in the Prison Environment.”

Analyzing crime and punishment through the senses has led some cultural criminologists to think about how all the senses come together to create an overall atmosphere (Young, 2021). An  atmosphere is more than just the air that surrounds us; it can evoke a feeling throughout our bodies. Have you ever walked into an old building and felt uneasy, a sense of foreboding, or a tingling in your spine? What makes us feel this way? Is it the smells, sounds and sensations of an old crumbling building, or a feeling that something is lingering here? These were some of the sensations I experienced when, as a teenager, I explored an old abandoned residential school in my hometown. Recently, Fidder, Kindynis and Linnemann (2022) published Ghost Criminology: The Afterlife of Crime and Punishment (2022) where they argue that ghosts provide analytical tools to think about how past injustices haunt the present and the threaten the future, as well as how policing and criminal justice can turn some people into ghosts. Throughout this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate the way ongoing colonial injustices and resistance play out in everyday moments and through forms of cultural expression. Ghost criminologists would argue that colonialism still haunts us today. Like a ghost, past injustices haunt our present and demand that something be done to correct these wrongs and shape a new future (Gordon, 2008). Ghost criminology encourages us to take action today to deal with wrongs thought only to exist in the past.

Another way that ghosts are used by cultural criminology is to study those who have been ‘ghosted’ or made to disappear. Jeff Ferrell (2022) studies the traces or residues of criminalised people forced to live in the shadows and out of sight—like ghosts. This includes unhoused people and illegal migrants. Most major cities use bylaws and policing to restrict where unhoused people can live to keep them out-of-sight. Remember my commute to work where I mentioned the unhoused camped under a highway overpass? When I went back recently the camp was gone, leaving only a few traces—a shopping cart full of discarded possessions and some litter. Ghost methods use traces like this to try to understand the forces that compel some people to live a life on society’s margins. For example, in early 2026, a largescale crackdown on illegal migrants by federal ICE agents in the US has turned some communities into ghost towns. The streets of neighbourhoods that were once home to vibrant migrant communities in Minneapolis, for example, had become eerily empty and rendered ghostly. Ghost criminology is a way of trying to see people and things no longer there in order to reveal oppressive practices like colonialism and policing of marginalised communities in order to understand and resist the forces that ‘ghost’. Keep your eyes open and your other senses attuned for traces and signs of people in your neighbourhood who are not longer there. Then, take a moment to reflect about why.