The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology

Sensory Criminology: Expanding the Criminological Imagination 
Kate Herrity, Kanupriya Sharma, Janani Umamaheswar and Jason Warr                

Section 1: Sensory Politics of Violence 
Sensing Violence: Traces, Echoes, and Afterlives
Liam Gillespie, Kanupriya Sharma and Hannah R. Wilkinson

1.     Listening to Donald Trump’s Voice: ‘Fight like hell!’, the Capitol Hill Riots, and the Spectre of Teleprompter Trump
Liam Gillespie                

2. ‘SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH’: Sound, Silence and Gender-Based Violence
Amanda Holt and Siân Lewis             

3.The Sound of Violence: Paramilitary Experience in Ireland
Colm Walsh

4.War, Colonialism, and the Senses: 'You can’t unsee or unhear that shit'
Hannah R. Wilkinson

 Section 2: Coloniality, Imperialism, and the Senses     
Recognising Abhorrent Legacies: Lessons for Sensory Criminology
Onwubiko Agozino, Rose (Rosabelle) Boswell, Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Sharon Gabie, Andrew Kettler, Macpherson Uchenna Nnam, Jessica Leigh Thornton, and Jason Warr

5. Doing Justice Differently: A Pan-Africanist Perspective
Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Abiodun Omotayo Oladejo, and Macpherson Uchenna Nnam     

6. “I’ll Make You Shit!”: Olfactory Othering and the Necropolitics of Colonial Prisons
Andrew Kettler        

7. The Sensory Aspects of Abhorrent Heritage in South Africa
Rose (Rosabelle) Boswell, Jessica Leigh Thornton,  Sharon Gabie , Zanele Hartmann,  and Ismail Lagardien        

8. 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, Özlem Turhal de Chiara, and Raghavi Viswanath       

9. Black light. Drawing, Music, and Theatre as Sensory Practices in the Encounter Between Incarcerated People and University Students
Lorenzo Natali , Glenda Acito, and Özlem Turhal de Chiara        

10. Crackle and Flicker: Music and Multisensory Experiences in Prison
Lucy Cathcart Frödén and Áine Mangaoang          

11. Seeing Museums as Criminological Spaces of Colonialism: An Affective Tale of Two Museum Visits
Raghavi Viswanath and Fangyi Li              

12. 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   

 13. Conflicting Senses, Victims, and the Courtroom: the case of Cindy Gladue
Dale Spencer and Marcus Sibley

14. The Sensory Effects of Racial Profiling in Berlin’s KBO’s 
Melody Howse   

15. 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 Ayşegül Yıldırım

 16. Seeing and Sensing Environmental Harm: The Death of the British Countryside
Amy Gibbons              

17. The Sensory Ocean: Exploring Noise and Light Pollution as Blue Crime
Ascensión García Ruiz          

18. Sensitising Criminology to Experiences of Environmental Noise
Ayşegül Yıldırım

Section 6: Space, Place, and the Sensory       
Vivid and Vibrant Criminological Landscapes: Sense and Space
Kevin Barnes-Ceeney, Priti Mohandas, and Janani Umamaheswar     

19. Dispossessed Realities: Houselessness and Spatial Violence
Luisa T. Schneider           

20. Release Day
Kevin Barnes-Ceeney and Victoria Espinoza         

21. I Can't Breathe! Housing, Masculinities, and Violence in Cape Town, South Africa
Priti Mohandas 

22. 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

23. Sitting, Seeing, and Getting Lost: The Sensory Aesthetics of Latvia’s Women’s Prison
Arta Jalili-Idrisi         

24. Time, Temporality, and Chronoception in Forensic Psychological Practice
Jason Warr          

25. "It’s a Circus": The Production of Domestic Violence Proceedings in Lower Courts of Mumbai, India
Sneha Bhambri   

26. 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 

27. Sense and Insensibility: How Technologies Invite and Invisibilise Harm
Briony Anderson, Mark A Wood, Jackson Wood, Will Arpke-Wales, and Flynn Pervan            

28. Audio Criminology: Broadening the Criminological Imagination Through the Use of Audio Methods
Sarah Kingston        

29. ‘Still feels like jail’: Sensing Danger, Bleakness, and Empathy in a State-Run Home For Boys
Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, Aishwarya Chandran, and Sanjukta Manna

Biography

Kate Herrity is a fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, and Co‑Director of King’s Entrepreneurship Laboratory. Her work has focused on using a sensory lens to explore confinement and social control, as in Sensory Penalities, co‑edited with Bethany Schmidt and Jason Warr. She has a particular interest in the social significance of sound – as well as music – in prison, the focus of the monograph of her PhD Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown and the forthcoming Sound and Detention: Towards Critical Listening, Sonic Citizenship and Social Justice co‑edited with Lucy Cathcart Frödén and Áine Mangaoang. She likes to work at the meeting places and boundaries between criminology and other fields and disciplines.

Kanupriya Sharma is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham. She recently completed her PhD in Criminology at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge with the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Her research sits at the intersections of imprisonment, caste, gender, kinship, and state power, with a particular focus on how socio‑cultural norms, moral frameworks, and structural inequalities shape criminalisation, punishment, and the lived experiences of incarcerated women in South Asia. She is especially committed to decolonial methodologies and culturally responsive ethnographic practices. Kanupriya is the founder and convenor of the Cambridge Decolonising Criminology Network, an intellectual initiative that challenges Eurocentric frameworks in criminology, amplifies marginalised voices, and promotes decolonial, Indigenous, and subaltern approaches to criminological theory and research.

Janani Umamaheswar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. Her research is broadly in the areas of social inequality, punishment and incarceration, and qualitative research methods. Her work has been published in journals such as Justice Quarterly, the British Journal of Criminology, Punishment & Society, and Theoretical Criminology.

Jason Warr is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include penology, sociology of power, narrative and sensory criminology, and the philosophy of science. His most recent book is concerned with forensic psychologists employed within the prisons of England and Wales: Forensic Psychologists: Prisons, Power, and Vulnerability.

Multi-layered and lavishly sensorial, this splendid volume assembles a set of provocative works that unveil intriguing facets of sensory criminology. Interlacing arguments drawn from different regions of the globe, the authors pique readers to consider how sensory rhetorics and practices crystalize how we approach justice, spatial and temporal politics, power and violence.

Professor Kelvin E.Y. Low: National University of Singapore:
Author of Sensory Anthropology: Culture and Experience in Asia (2023)

 

This incredibly important and absolutely stunning volume brings readers to criminology through the senses. Its editors and contributors skilfully show how foregrounding sensory experience, narratives, spatialities and temporalities invokes new moves towards necessary decolonising, and gender focused, environmental, and arts based justice. This is a must-read for all scholars and students of criminology!

Laureate Professor Sarah Pink, PhD, FASSA, Dr h.c. Technology (Malmo), Dr h.c. Philosophy (Halmstad), Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, Director, Emerging Technologies Research Lab & FUTURES Hub, Leader Mobilities Focus Area and People Programme, ARC CoE for ADM+S, Monash Art, Design and Architecture & Faculty of Information Technology

 

Sensory criminology has generated a great deal of noise (and, indeed, feels) over the past few years, because justice has always been about gut-level emotion. This state-of-the-art collection of new research directions in this expanding field vividly demonstrates just how much we have been missing with traditional methodologies up until now.

Professor Shadd Maruna, Head of Sociology, Social Policy & Criminology, University of Liverpool