The main aim of this essay is to explore prisoner life writing within the specific, richly and multiply dependent context of teaching and learning undergraduate criminology at an English university, from the authorial viewpoint of a teacher and her students as budding criminologists and coauthors. This article seeks to redress a continuing resistance to life history approaches in criminology, despite the discipline being formally devoted to the understanding of the meaning and experience of imprisonment in all its forms and consequences. What follows is a reflection on what students had to say on the fascinating subject of prisoner auto/biography and its place in popular and expert discourses on crime, criminality, and punishment, contextualised within the academic discipline of criminology. Imprisonment has emerged as a crucial theme in contemporary globalised society, whether considered in its practical manifestations as a punitive system for locking up increasing numbers of people, as a potent metaphor for what is widely regarded as the carceral society, or as a noumenal trope for exploring philosophical, political, moral, and/or cultural possibilities of freedom, creativity, self-expression, and transformation through the notion of confinement. 1 Across these diverse, shifting, and interweaving narrative constellations -and more -there is a vast and growing corpus of research literatures on imprisonment and (life) writing and their implications for individuals and societies from a range of historical, philosophical, sociological, cultural, legal-judicial, and/or other perspectives. A comprehensive review of the literature on prisoner life writing, an important

The aim of this chapter is to analyse and interrogate the identities of ‘traffickers’ as represented within a series of television documentaries on modern slavery. The chapter data set is a series of seven 25-minute documentaries entitled Modern Slavery: A Twenty-first Century Evil (2011) produced by Al Jazeera. Sections on trafficker identities and the usage of the term ‘trafficker’ within the different typologies represented in the documentary series are shown, that is, bridal, charcoal, prison, sex, food, child, bonded slavery/trafficking. These are represented within a complex geocultural televisual gaze (Al Jazeera English) upon the global north/west as ultimately the source of the slavery problem.

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This article was inspired by the controversy over claims of ‘pedophilia!!!!’ undertones and the ‘triggering’ of memories of childhood sexual abuse in some viewers by the dance performance featured in the music video for Sia’s ‘Elastic Heart’ (2015). The case is presented for acknowledging the hidden and/or overlooked presence of dance in social scientific theory and cultural studies and how these can enhance and advance cultural criminological research. Examples of how these insights have been used within other disciplinary frameworks to analyse and address child sex crime and sexual trauma are provided, and the argument is made that popular cultural texts such as dance in pop music videos should be regarded as significant in analysing and tracing public perceptions and epistemologies of crimes such as child sex abuse.

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