Making Sense of Crime and Justice (CRIM90018)

Criminology draws its frameworks for inquiry and understanding from a wide range of intellectual traditions and contemporary conceptualisations. There are many recent advances in a diverse array of theory fields that challenge and excite the foundations and practices of criminological inquiry. This subject takes a problem-centred approach to understanding the usefulness of theory in examining matters of pressing criminological concern including, for example, the lived effects of historic and structural injustice, shifting understandings and perceptions of what counts as crime (and what counts as justice), and contemporary challenges arising from the global movement of populations. Choosing different examples of how such problems might materialise (such as through racialised policing, definitions and regulation of anti-social behaviour, the privatisation of criminal justice, practices of preventative detention), this subject presents a variety of theories that can help criminologists look at these problems in new ways. The theories offered can be drawn from developments in history, race, feminism, culture, law, psychoanalysis, or post-colonialism, and the subject assesses their capacity to enrich criminological thinking.