AP/SOSC 4654 6.00

Representing Crime

Crosslisted: AP/CRIM 4654

Contemporary culture’s preoccupation with the detection and punishment of crime and criminals extends beyond the criminal justice system and into popular culture. Academic criminological work has informed us of the realities of crime and criminal justice, but this research has not penetrated into the popular imagination to the same extent as certain non-academic representations of crime and justice. While cultural constructions of crime, disorder, dangerousness and risk are integral parts of the criminal justice process, often provoking fear and inspiring strategies of control and prevention, they also entertain. Bearing in mind that entertaining representations also implicitly inform the public, this course examines the following questions: how do we imagine ‘crime’ and ‘criminal,’ and what effects do these images have? How do these images implicitly encapsulate representations of a particular law, order, and authority? What types of knowledge are assumed by imagining crime and/or law in such a way? This course offers a number of analytical tools developed within cultural studies, social semiotics, media studies, and sociology to answer these questions. Most criminological work has focused on crime-related representations in the news media, emphasizing that they are misleading and/or inaccurate. In contrast, this seminar course asks students to critically analyze visual, textual and physical representations of crime and law-and-order for more than their ‘accuracy’ and representativeness of reality. Instead, this course explores the techniques used to construct the ‘criminal,’ authority and audience positions, and how these techniques travel across different media, ranging from factual reports to fictional accounts, and from official representations to Hollywood filmic representations of law and order. Students are asked to reflect upon the following four key themes through their course assignments: (1) What kinds of social effects do representations elicit? Here, students explore various theories about media effects and audience reception. (2) How is crime represented? Using semiotics, students examine how representations of crime and law are structured along binary lines in Western culture. (3) Following the use of semiotics and its binary logic of representation, students discuss the mutual constitution of criminal/crime and law enforcement/law. (4) Lastly, students analyze the interplay between fact and fiction across various kinds of representations (e.g. films, TV programs, statues, news items, lawyer jokes, policy reports, etc.), and the ways in which both contribute to the criminological imagination.