Existentialist Criminology


Book Description

Existentialist Criminology captures an emerging interest in the value of existentialist thought and concepts for criminological work on crime, deviance, crime control, and criminal justice. This emerging interest chimes with recent social and cultural developments - as well as shifts in their theoretical consideration - that are oriented around contingency and unpredictability. But whilst these conditions have largely been described and analysed through the lens of complexity theory, post-structuralist theory and postmodernism, there exploration by critical criminologists in existentialist terms offers a richer and more productive approach to the social and cultural dimensions of crime, deviance, crime control and, more broadly, of regulation and governance. Covering a range of topics that lend themselves quite naturally to existentialist analysis - crime and deviance as becoming and will, the existential openness of symbolic exchange, the internal conversations that take place within criminal justice practices, and the contingent and finite character of resistance - the contributions to this volume set out to explore a largely untapped reservoir of critical potential.




Crime, Governance and Existential Predicaments


Book Description

This collection focuses on the existential predicaments and choices that underpin current debates and developments in the governance of crime and criminal justice and argues for the relevance of existentialist thought for enhancing a critical and philosophically inspired criminological imagination.




Financial Crimes and Existential Philosophy


Book Description

The aim of this book is to deepen our understanding of financial crimes as phenomena. It uses concepts of existential philosophies that are relevant to dissecting the phenomenon of financial crimes. With the help of these concepts, the book makes clear what the impact of financial crimes is on the way a human being defines himself or the way he focuses on a given notion of humankind. The book unveils how the growth of financial crimes has contributed to the increase of the anthropological gap, and how the phenomenon of financial crimes now distorts the way we understand humankind. Using the existential philosophies of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Buber, Heidegger, and Marcel, the book sheds light on how these philosophies can help to better perceive and describe financial crimes. Next it looks at prevention strategies from an organizational perspective, using concepts of Sartre, Gadamer and Tillich. The book provides readers with existential principles that will help them be more efficient when they have to design and implement prevention strategies against corporate crime.




Theoretical Criminology from Modernity to Post-Modernism


Book Description

This book incorporates many of the exciting debates in the social sciences and philosophy of knowledge concerning the issues of modernity and post-modernism. It sets out a new project for criminology, a criminology of modernity, and offers a sustained critique of theorizing without a concern for social totalities. This book is designed to place criminological theory at the cutting edge of contemporary debates. Wayne Morrison reviews the history and present state of criminology and identifies a range of social problems and large scale social processes which must be addressed if the subject is to attain intellectual commitment. This book marks a new development in criminological texts and will serve a valuable function not only for students and academics but for all those interested in the project of understanding crime in contemporary conditions.




Genocide and Victimology


Book Description

Genocide and Victimology examines genocide in its diverse features, from different yet connected perspectives, to offer an interdisciplinary, victimological imagination of genocide. It will include in its exploration critical and cultural victimologies and criminologies of genocide, accompanied by, and recognising, the rich scholarship on genocide in the fields of religion and history, theatre studies and photography, philosophy and existentialism, post-colonialism, and ethnography and biography. Bringing together theory with empirical research and drawing on a range of case studies, such as the Treblinka extermination camp, the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides, the Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, Canada, and genocidal violence in Syria and Iraq, this book engages the victimological imagination towards an interdisciplinary, cosmopolitan victimology of genocide. Bundled and intertwined, the wide yet integrated variety of perspectives on genocide gives readers a victimological kaleidoscope to discover, and for victimology hitherto, unexplored theory and methodology. This way, readers can develop their own more epistemologically, theoretically, and methodologically robust victimology of genocide—a victimology of genocide as envisioned by Nicole Rafter. The book hopes to canvas an understanding and a starting point for a diverse appreciation of genocide victimhood and survivorship from which the real post-genocidal harms and sites, post-traumatic stress disorder, courts and tribunals, and overall meaningful justice will benefit. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, history, religious studies, English literature, and all those concerned with not repeating a history of genocide.




A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Criminology


Book Description

In Studying Criminology, the author explores the interplay between philosophical and criminological theories to provide a stimulating and insightful overview of the subject. It offers students a fresh way of thinking about crime, giving them an opportunity to develop their understanding and to hone their critical skills. Conceived by Chris Grey as an antidote to conventional textbooks, each book in the ‘Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap’ series takes a core area of the curriculum and turns it on its head by providing a critical and sophisticated overview of the key issues and debates in an informal, conversational and often humorous way. Suitable for Undergraduate and Postgraduate students of Criminology and anybody interested in the field of Criminological studies.




Literary Theory and Criminology


Book Description

Literary Theory and Criminology demonstrates the significance of contemporary literary theory to the discipline of criminology, particularly to those criminologists who are primarily concerned with questions of power, inequality, and harm. Drawing on innovations in philosophical, narrative, cultural, and pulp criminology, it sets out a deconstructive framework as part of a critical criminological critique-praxis. This book comprises eight essays – on globalisation, criminological fiction, poststructuralism, patriarchal political economy, racial capitalism, anthropocidal ecocide, critical theory, and critical praxis – that argue for the value of contemporary literary theory to a critical criminology concerned with the construction of a just and sustainable reality in the face of climate change and other mass harms. This is the first criminology book to engage with literary theory from the perspective of criminology and provides a guide for criminologists who want to deploy literary theory as part of their research programmes. It supersedes existing engagements with poststructuralism in the philosophical criminological tradition because it entails neither a constructionist ontology nor a relativist epistemology. It shows criminologists how literary theory offers the tools to first deconstruct and then reconstruct meaning and value. Literary Theory and Criminology is essential reading for all critical criminological theorists.




Criminology


Book Description

Criminology is a broad-ranging and stimulating introduction that is ideal for undergraduates approaching the subject for the first time. Each chapter is written by an expert in their field and includes a range of learning features designed to help students engage with the material covered.




Understanding desistance from crime


Book Description

Why do people stop offending? What are the processes they undergo in stopping? What can be done to help more people who have offended put their pasts behind them? The growth of interest in why people stop offending and how they are resettled following punishment has been remarkable. Once a marginal topic in criminology, it is now a central topic of research and theorising amongst those studying criminal careers. This book is both an introduction to research on desistance, and the report on a follow-up of two hundred probationers sentenced to supervision in the late 1990s. The reader is introduced to some of the wider issues and debates surrounding desistance via a consideration of the criminal careers of a group of ex-offenders. This lively engagement with both data and theoretical matters makes the book a useful tool for both academics and students. The book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics studying criminology, criminal justice, sociology, social work, social policy and psychology, as well as trainee probation officers.




The Routledge Handbook of International Crime and Justice Studies


Book Description

This book presents the enduring debates and emerging challenges in crime and justice studies from an international and multi-disciplinary perspective.




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