1st Edition

Green Cultural Criminology Constructions of Environmental Harm, Consumerism, and Resistance to Ecocide

By Avi Brisman, Nigel South Copyright 2014
    174 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    174 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Over the last two decades, "green criminology" has emerged as a unique area of study, bringing together criminologists and sociologists from a wide range of research backgrounds and varying theoretical orientations. It spans the micro to the macro—from individual-level environmental crimes and victimization to business/corporate violations and state transgressions. There have been few attempts, however, to explicitly or implicitly integrate cultural criminology into green criminology (or vice versa).

    This book moves towards articulating a green cultural criminological perspective. Brisman and South examine existing overlapping research and offer a platform to support future excursions by green criminologists into cultural criminology’s concern with media images and representations, consumerism and consumption, and resistance. At the same time, they offer an invitation to cultural criminologists to adopt a green view of the consumption landscape and the growth (and depictions) of environmental harms.

    Green Cultural Criminology is aimed at students, academics, criminologists, and sociologists with an interest in green criminology and cultural criminology: two of the most exciting new areas in criminology today.

    1. Introduction: greening criminology and connecting to the cultural  2. Overview of cultural criminology  3. A green field for cultural criminology  4. Constructions of Environmental Harm  5. Consumption, environment, health and happiness  6. Marketing and consuming nature and the natural: water, quarantine and infantilisation  7. Resistance to Environmental Harm  8. Conclusion and Future Directions.

    Biography

    Avi Brisman (MFA, JD, PhD) is an assistant professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, KY (USA). His writing has appeared in such journals as Contemporary Justice Review,  Crime, Law and Social Change, Crime Media Culture, Critical Criminology, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Race and Justice, Theoretical Criminology, and Western Criminology Review, among others. He co-edited the Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology (2013) with Professor Nigel South of the University of Essex, as well as Environmental Crime and Social Conflict: Contemporary and Emerging Issues with Professor South and Professor Rob White of the University of Tasmania (Ashgate, 2014).  

    Nigel South is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, UK and an adjunct professor in the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology. He serves on several editorial boards and is the European Editor of Critical Criminology. In 2013 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Criminology, Division on Critical Criminology.

    'Charting criminology’s response to contemporary economic and ecological crises, Brisman and South show how rivulets of criminological analysis formed around issues of consumerism, waste, environmental harm, and environmental activism. As Brisman and South demonstrate, over the past two decades these rivulets have coalesced into two larger streams of critical thought: cultural criminology and green criminology. Now, with this brilliantly synthetic book, these two streams have themselves reached a confluence, and with it the river of innovation, insight and analysis that is green cultural criminology.' - Jeff Ferrell, Professor of Sociology, Texas Christian University, USA and Visiting Professor of Criminology, University of Kent, UK

    'A brilliant and needed link between fields of criminology that contributes greatly to the understanding of the environment–culture nexus. Untangling the relationship between the environment and culture is essential to protecting the planet, and Brisman and South do so expertly, which will undoubtedly push the boundaries of both green and cultural criminology for years to come.' - Tanya Wyatt, Northumbria University, UK

    'In Green Cultural Criminology, Avi Brisman and Nigel South integrate two of critical criminology’s most innovative developments in recent years: green criminology, with its focus on harms perpetrated against the environment and non-human species, and cultural criminology, with its focus on the role of the media and consumption in late modern society. The book invites green criminologists to integrate into their analysis the focal concerns of cultural criminology in order to better understand how environmental harms are mediated and constructed, while throwing down a challenge to cultural criminologists to "green" their discipline. Timely and challenging, this book pushes the borders of critical criminology in a unique way.' - Simon Hallsworth, Executive Dean, Faculty of Art Business and Applied Social Science, University Campus Suffolk, UK

    'This book, written by world-leading experts, makes a substantial original contribution to green cultural criminology—a new and exciting multidisciplinary field of international scholarship. I commend this book to students, practitioners, academics, and policymakers with an interest in ecocide and eco-justice.' - Kerry Carrington, Head of School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

    In this important, creative book, Brisman (Eastern Kentucky Univ.) and South (Univ. of Essex, UK), two pioneers of green criminology and coeditors of the Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology (2013), aim to merge green criminology and cultural criminology by emphasizing their numerous areas of overlapping content and critical political perspective.  -P. Beirne, University of Southern Maine , Summing Up: Highly recommended, CHOICE Reviews, December 2014.