Research methods – Sensory Criminology

Introducing… Sensory Criminology: Expanding the Criminological Imagination

This short post marks the opening of a series dedicated to discussing each of the organising themes of the Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology, in preparation for its launch. Each piece will leave comments open as an experiment in discussion. Please feel free to leave talking points or ask questions – we particularly welcome questions from students.

The book asks what the sensory can contribute to our understanding and pursuit of criminological inquiry? What might the value be, of attending to the sensory in social scientific and criminological investigation? What do we even mean by “the senses”? Conventionally thought of as being restricted to sight, sound, smell, touch, taste – and often laid out in that hierarchy – what happens if this is extended to include a broader range of perceptual stimuli? What happens to how we can utilise a sensory approach to criminology if we add clarity, distinguishing it from adjacent, but distinct, theoretical frameworks adopted by phenomenological and affective perspectives? How can we think about violence and its politics, how coloniality and imperialism frame our understandings of justice and punishment, narrative and the arts in the context of criminal justice – and its absence, Environmental harm and how criminal justice practices impose particular understandings of place, space, time and justice, and how the sensory can inform methodological approaches to the rapidly changing contours of criminology and society.

The handbook is dedicated to expanding these ideas and considering how developing a set of principles to guide our approach to sensory criminology works to allow for a deeper consideration of implications for decolonial thinking. This enhances capacity, we argue, for disrupting western empirical hierarchies and the social systems they both shore up and are reinforced by. The book aims to amplify voices and experiences from beyond the Global North and to expand the possibilities of our criminological imagination.

CONTENTS

Sensory Criminology: Expanding our Imagination Kate Herrity, Kanupriya Sharma, Janani Umamaheswar, Jason Warr

Section 1: Sensory Politics of Violence

Sensing Violence: Traces, Echoes, and Afterlives Liam Gillespie, Kanupriya Sharma and Hannah Wilkinson

Listening to Donald Trump’s Voice: ‘Fight like hell!’, the Capitol Hill Riots, and the Spectre of Teleprompter Trump Liam Gillespie
‘SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH’: Sound, Silence and Gender-Based Violence Amanda Holt and Sian Lewis
The Sound of Violence: Paramilitary experience in Ireland Colm Walsh
War, Colonialism and the Senses: “You can’t unsee or unhear that shit” Hannah Wilkinson

Section 2: Coloniality, Imperialism, and the Senses

Recognising Abhorrent Legacies: Lessons for Sensory Criminology Onwubiko Agozino, Rose Boswell, Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Sharon Gabie, Andrew Kettler, Macpherson Uchenna Nnam, Jessica Leigh Thornton, and Jason Warr

Doing Justice Differently: A Pan-Africanist Perspective Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Abiodun Omotayo Oladejo, and Macpherson Uchenna Nnam
“I’ll Make You Shit!”: Olfactory Othering and the Necropolitics of Colonial Prisons Andrew Kettler
The Sensory Aspects of Abhorrent Heritage in South Africa Rosabelle Boswell, Jessica Leigh Thornton, Sharon Gabie , Zanele Hartmann, and Ismail Lagardien
Decolonizing Sensory Rhetorics and Activism in Africana Prison Memoirs Onwubiko Agozino

Section 3: Sensory, Narrative, and the Arts

Reimagining Justice through Creative Encounters and Sensory Knowing Glenda Acito, Lucy Cathcart Frödén, Fangyi Li, Lorenzo Natali, Nabil Ouassini, Kanupriya Sharma, Ozlem Turhal, and Raghavi Viswanath

Black light. Drawing, Music and Theatre as Sensory Practices in the Encounter Between Inmates and University Students Lorenzo Natali , Glenda Acito, and Ozlem Turhal
Crackle and Flicker: Music and Multisensory Experiences in Prison Lucy Cathcart Frödén and Áine Mangaoang
Seeing Museums as Criminological Spaces: An Affective Tale of Two Museum Visits Raghavi Viswanath and Fangyi Li
‘Sensory Criminology, Islamic Auditory Traditions, and Rehabilitation Nabil Ouassini and Anwar Ouassini

Section 4: Sensing (In)Justice

From the Courtroom to the Street: The Sensory Dimensions of Racialised (In)justice Barbara Becnel, Dale Spencer, and Jason Warr

Conflicting Senses, Victims, and the Courtroom: the case of Cindy Gladue Marcus Sibley and Dale Spencer
The Sensory Effects of Racial Profiling in Berlin’s KBO’s. Melody Howse
Racialized Punishment and the Sensorial Symbolism of Death Row for America’s Black Gangster Class Barbara Becnel

Section 5: Environmental Harm and the Senses

“The Way the Soil Crumbled in Their Hands”: Sensing Environmental Harms Amy Gibbons, Ascensión García Ruiz, Janani Umamaheswar, and Aysegul Yildirim

Seeing and Sensing Environmental Harm: The Death of the British Countryside Amy Gibbons
The Sensory Ocean: Exploring Noise and Light Pollution as Blue Crime Ascension Garcia-Ruiz
Sensitising Criminology to Experiences of Environmental Noise Aysegul Yildirim

Section 6: Space, Place, and the Sensory

Vivid and Vibrant Criminological Landscapes: Sense and Space Kevin Barnes-Ceeney, Priti Mohandas, and Janani Umamaheswar

Dispossessed Realities: Houselessness, and Spatial Violence Luisa T. Schneider
Release from Prison Day Kevin Barnes-Ceeney and Victoria Espinoza
“I can’t breathe” Housing, Masculinities and Violence in Cape Town, South Africa Priti Mohandas
Scrutinising Social Control in the City through the Senses Anna Di Ronco and Nina Peršak

Section 7: Time, Justice, and the Sensory

Beholding Justice and Punishment Sneha Bhambri, Eamonn Carrabine, Kate Herrity, Arta Jalili-Idrissi and Jason Warr

Sitting, Seeing and Getting Lost: The Sensory Aesthetics of Latvia’s Women’s Prison Arta Jalili-Idris
Time, Temporality, and Chronoception Jason Warr
It’s a Circus: The Production of Domestic Violence Proceedings in Lower Courts of Mumbai, India Sneha Bhambri
Beholding Justice: Images of Punishment in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Eamonn Carrabine

Section 8: Sensory Methods

“They Are Not Like You and I”: Sensory Methods Briony Anderson, Kate Herrity, Sarah Kingston and Mark Wood

Sense and Insensibility: How Technologies Invite and Invisibilise Harm Briony Anderson, Mark A Wood, Jackson Wood, Will Arpke-Wales, and Flynn Pervan
Audio Criminology: Broadening the Criminological Imagination Through the Use of Audio Methods Sarah Kingston
‘Still feels like jail’: Sensing Danger, Bleakness and Friendship in a State-Run Home For Boys Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, Aishwarya Chandran and Sanjukta Manna

This project began life as a conversation between Tom Sutton and I (Kate Herrity) at the 2022 BSC conference. Shortly after, Kanupriya Sharma, Janani Umamaheswar and Jason Warr joined. The four of us divided up the eight sections which organise the book. Each of the authors of the three or four chapters within them were invited to take part in a discussion with one another about their work. These discussions formed the basis for each introduction section of the book. Since these sections are an accessible way of introducing the contents of the book in a way which lends a substantial project a coherent narrative, they seem like a sensible focus for discussion.

As with all projects, people decline and others drop out, representation is partial, interests and approaches of the editors are reflected in those invited to participate… We discuss all this at greater length and depth in the introduction, along with our hopes for the future and the guiding ethos of the book. We hope to invite more people to the table and enrich a conversation we do not aim to be the last word in.

Kate Herrity

“I’m very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term ‘holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson” Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

I’m an academic, a criminologist focusing on prisons research. I’m also dyspraxic. This means I tend to experience the world as a maelstrom of sounds, colours, and textures. This sensory information is a challenge to process. Bright lights and sharp sounds heighten my disorientation and difficulty making my way through space. Keeping track of legs and arms while in motion requires consuming levels of concentration. Floundering in real time as I attempt to impose memory to get from here to there – using sound for primitive echolocation in a clumsy attempt to forecast coming obstacles. This outward chaos echoes the indistinct, interconnected blurring mass of ideas, sensations, feelings. Sitting down to work, to make sense of this overwhelming sensorium, means gearing up to wrestle a many-tendrilled beast of distractions. I cast blindly for the words to explicate this confusion of sensorial input, to impose some form and order.

In new and hectic environments, I experience this sensory overload as physical discomfort. Loud, sudden sound stings my ears, freezing my thoughts. I recoil from bright light which dazzles and discombobulates. I avoid touching and being touched in unfamiliar surrounds lest its novelty proves too intense and jars with my attempts to navigate space. I constantly try to maintain a smooth projection of normality, as I balance unruly limbs and focus thoughts all the while under the threat of halting disruption by the addition of one curve ball, some new and unanticipated thing; an innocuous instruction or request.

Visiting prison for the first time as a library assistant, the sensory experience of this alien space lodged deep in my memory. Over ten years on (and having returned to this particular prison on a couple of subsequent occasions) I revisit that same sensation by degree, entering this closed and secret place as a researcher. The sounds, smells, and institutional hues intensify with each new creaking and clanging of an unlocked gate. Within the prison’s central control point, dizzying spurs (landings) stretch upwards and around in a sharp symphony of disorientating shouts, cries, bangs and jangles…Overwhelmed by this swirling soundscape, I lose all concentration.

What can this auditory deluge tell us about what it means to exist in prisons? How does it affect people and shape relationships within these most peculiar spaces? I feel through the inarticulable sensory fog, this thick plate glass, this just-too-much, for words to convey sensory experience of this social world, and fight to impose some sequence on this blurry collection of stuff. By focusing less on these distant, blunt-wordy tools, and more on the feelings, sounds and senses they can capture, the chaos calms. The sensory overload is partially abated, and I can begin to discern a story through the “fundamental interconnectedness” of all these things:

Now… where was I?