Documentary Criminology: Expanding the Criminological Imagination with “Mardi Gras—Made in China” as a Case Study (23 Minutes)

Abstract

This paper explores the central role of documentary filmmaking as a methodological practice in contemporary criminology. It draws from cultural criminology to develop emerging, open-ended practices for conducting ethnographically inflected audiovisual research that crafts sensory knowledge from aesthetic experience. First, it demonstrates how documentary criminology is an ethnographic practice that embraces audiovisual technologies to inflect, render, and depict the aesthetics of material, sensory, and corporeal experiences of crime and transgression as knowledge production. Second, it explores a particular type of lived experience that John Dewey terms "aesthetic" to demonstrate the sorts of tangible and intangible entities that documentary criminology can interpret, record and depict as knowledge. To demonstrate this approach, the article employs a variety of examples from cultural criminology and from the documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China. The final part of the paper turns to an analysis of Mardi Gras: Made in China itself to illustrate the overlap of theory, methods, and reflexive practices of documentary criminology within four broad aesthetic domains: temporality, topography, corporeality, and the personal. The inclusion of documentary within an open-ended methodological sensibility, both as a mode of analysis and as a means of producing sensory knowledge, can expand the criminological imagination.

Historical context and the criminological imagination: Towards a three-dimensional criminology

“…Mills’ sociological imagination has been translated into the notion of a ‘criminological imagination’. This term has been used to describe the attributes that criminology is seen to be lacking at certain points in time (Whitehead, 1985; Williams, 1984) and to denote a praise-worthy quality that certain pieces of academic research possess (Barton et al, 2007; Redmon, 2015) or some groups of people (usually students) should develop (Carrabine et al, 2004). Some more elaborate attempts to apply Mills’ conceptual framework to criminology have also been made.…”

“…There has also been a flurry of relevant recent publications (e.g. Fraser and Hagedorn, 2018; Redmon, 2015). Notably, Jon Frauley’s (2015a) edited collection features a range of interesting contributions addressing this topic.…”

“…Even in some of the studies which extol the virtues of the criminological imagination, the role of history is mentioned only briefly (e.g. Frauley, 2015c; Redmon, 2015). Indeed, Nelken’s (2015: 255) contribution to Frauley’s edited collection goes as far as actually removing history from Mills’ work by stating that: ‘[w]hen C. Wright Mills wrote about the sociological imagination he was mainly concerned with recognizing connections between individual biography (“personal troubles”) and social structure’.…”

Documentary criminology:Girl Modelas a case study

“…Criminologists are no longer limited to theorising, analysing or writing critical research articles about images of crime, harm and transgression: the development of documentary criminology expands researchers' ability to craft media, yoking the strengths of written text to the visceral by guest on September 16, 2016 cmc.sagepub.com Downloaded from experience of audiovisual depiction. Documentary criminology draws upon the rich history of ethnography and Verstehen to help viewers come to grips with lived experiences of crime, harm and transgression through sensuous immediacy (Redmon, 2015b). Ferrell and Van de Voorde (2010) describe how, through the medium of film, criminologists can engage with ethnographic attentiveness:…”

“…Frauley (2010: 34) encourages the use of audiovisual tools to expand the methodological scope of criminology’s understanding of the visual, but notes that, at this point, these tools ‘are much more developed in other social sciences such as cultural studies and sociology’. Recently, however, the discipline of criminology has taken a sensory, sonic and visual turn, which has inspired the use of audiovisual tools in a burgeoning video methodology (Redmon, 2015b). During his keynote address at the University of Central Missouri, Jeff Ferrell (2008: 8) encouraged criminologists to use audiovisual methods to craft research as media: I cannot imagine how we can be criminologists in a world that is saturated by images and nonstop communication if we do not have theories and methods that can take us inside images … Researchers must go beyond what they learned in graduate school.…”