This book illustrates the importance of conflicting narratives in understanding and dealing with crime, based on a variety of cutting-edge research. Offenders tell stories about crime and punishment, as do policemen, judges and defence lawyers, but so do politicians and the media. Each tells them very differently and only some stories are believed, while others are rejected as implausible leading to conflict. This book explores how these conflicts are carried out and what relationships exist between (often unquestioned) master narratives and (sometimes loud, sometimes silent) counter-narratives. These are issues of central importance for criminology which have thus far received little attention.
This edited collection is international and interdisciplinary in scope, providing empirical insights from such diverse contexts as (social) media, newspapers, comics, police interrogations, social and criminal justice settings, and museum exhibitions. By including contributions from a wide spectrum of academic disciplines and using different methodological approaches, it is of particular interest to students and researchers in criminology and sociology, as well as to scholars of socio-legal studies.

  

“We should not have had to wait so long for the narrative turn to come to criminology when crime is clearly a phenomenon begging for narrative analysis: the human struggle between desire and the law. Narratives help to explicate – describe, locate, retell - events across their temporal unfolding while exposing inferences, contradictions, ellipses in what is known. This brilliantly conceived and executed collection provides a rich combination of narrative analyses and criminological scholarship to powerfully challenge popular and conventional theories of crime while offering more subtle, reliable, and sustainable accounts. This book shifts our focus to look more deeply at what we thought we already knew. An important book.” (Susan S. Silbey, Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US)

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