Meaning-making and crime drama: the case of criminology students

Abstract

Criminology as a discipline maintains an ambivalent attitude toward mass media. Following from Clifford and White's (2017) call for a more nuanced approach to media criminology, the first section of the article contextualises the present study by outlining the uneasy relationship between mainstream criminology and crime drama. The second section explores themes that arose during research that invited criminal justice students to create an outline for a television crime series that they would enjoy watching themselves. The experience of creating and talking about their crime fictions prompted the participants to reflect on aspects of their own lives in some detail, but relatively little on crime per se. Crime drama, including their own creations, provided the participants with an anchor to talk broadly about subjectivities and identities. The piece concludes with observations on the place of emotional engagement when consumers reflect on crime drama. 2 Meaning-making and crime drama: The case of criminology students Introduction: Criminologists and mass media The term 'popular criminology' was popularised by media criminologist Nicole Rafter (2007) to refer to the ways in which people develop their views about crime and justice. She noted that crime entertainment was central to these public understandings, and argued that: 'The two types of criminology, popular and academic, complement one another, each contributing in its own way to understandings of crime' (2007: 415). Thus, by strong implication, criminologists could not afford to treat mass media representations of crime as simply inferior entities. Interestingly, in view of Rafter's emphasis on complementarity, even the most empathetic surveys of media criminology suggest that, in the main, popular criminology and crime media in particular, continue to be seen by criminologists as marginal to the real business of scholarly criminology (Kohm, 2017; Wakeman, 2016). The cautious approach to scholarly analysis of fictional crime confirms Lam's (2014) observation that academic criminologists are more interested in 'corrective criticism' than in understanding the complexities of crime media production and consumption, or in understanding the ways crime drama is absorbed into the lives of audiences. Rather, corrective criticism tends 'to treat popular cultural representations as first and foremost inaccurate representations about crime or as questionable matters of fact' (p. 171). Media criminology, or the study of the ways in which crime media saturate and inform our lives and, in turn, the ways we interact with media, remains a relatively underdeveloped field of scholarship in Australia. Some topics are receiving increasing attention; for example, work here has tended to concentrate on the criminological implications of the uses and abuses of

Stereotyping Representation of Kensi Blye’s Character in Television Crime Drama Series NCIS: Los Angeles

“…Because crime dramas seek to attract large audiences and followers, programming tends to reflect cultural beliefs, societal sentiments, and circulate cultural images of gender (Cavender & Deutsch, 2007). It is likely that crime drama also gives exposure to the participants with an anchor to talk about identities and subjectivities (Wimshurst, 2018). Thus, it will give a new perspective for people about crime and criminality along with the identities and subjectivities.…”