Emerald Studies in Culture, Criminal Justice and The Arts – serie

Uniquely combining two parts, one critical in the form of a research piece, and the other creative in the form of a fictional novel, this ground-breaking book spans creative writing, criminology and architecture to look at the ways in which power and hierarchies are explored and exploited in space.Part one, A Circular Argument, is informed by a series of reflections on the author’s work as a prison teacher. Delving into the obsession with the circular as an architectural gesture and as a concept combining containment and transparency, the author examines spatial hierarchies across time, from the ideal planned city of the Middle Ages, to the all-seeing eye of modern digital society.Part two, The Out, follows the fictional story of a disgruntled architect, a clever prisoner and an ingenious escape plan. Exploring how the complications and surprises of human interaction colour and change the supposedly watertight systems of social control society designs, the novel disrupts how we might think about space and power.Injecting new energy and creative perspectives into traditional academic research, this practice-led book is an innovative exploration between critical and creative approaches, and between multiple social and spatial hierarchies.This series has been renamed to “Emerald Studies in Culture, Crime, Criminal Justice and the Arts” effective for 2025 publications onward.

Through a study of ten commercially published prison autobiographies, Haunting Prison: Exploring the Prison as an Abject and Uncanny Institution unveils how prison is narrativized and socially represented as an abject and uncanny institution, shedding new light on what prison is and does in Western carceral imaginations.Unveiling the layers of editing that position prison autobiographies between fact and fiction, Tea Fredriksson delves into how true crime’s claims to factuality coexist with the genre’s inescapable horror iconography. In a thematic analysis of how autobiographical prison stories make prison ‘come alive’ on the page as a site of abject horror and eerie unsettlement, Haunting Prison: Exploring the Prison as an Abject and Uncanny Institution explores how prison functions as a storied institution, both as a physical site of subterranean horrors and in terms of the many-layered stories told about prison and the bodies within it. Showcasing how prison expresses and distills the normative social anxieties of the global North-West and linking othering processes and unsettling likenesses as common narrational themes, Fredriksson reveals how prison is both an abject other to and a haunting, uncanny double of the outside world.A refreshing take on the study of true crime data, Haunting Prison: Exploring the Prison as an Abject and Uncanny Institution is appealing reading for scholars interested in qualitative research methods for studying crime, punishment and victimhood in popular culture.This series has been renamed to “Emerald Studies in Culture, Crime, Criminal Justice and the Arts” effective for 2025 publications onward.

Music can act as a powerful means of communication. Chronicling the first application of music elicitation in the Balkans, Music, Mattering, and Criminalized Young Men delves into its use as a social research method, pedagogical tool, and youth work intervention.Grounded in feminist principles, Jade Levell’s analysis provides a deep exploration and articulation of this method as a compelling narrative device which empowers participants, in this case men in prison and on probation in Albania, throughout the research process. Framing music elicitation and creation as professional listening tools, Levell develops the theory of ‘sonic mattering’ to explore the role music plays in the lives of young people as they seek to establish their place in the world. Situating music elicitation as a method of the upmost importance, chapters demonstrate its potential to disrupt traditional power imbalances by positioning the participant as expert. Drawing on a context of international development, Levell demonstrates music elicitation’s effectiveness in boosting participant engagement, building trust over a short period of time, and encouraging participants to share stories of their marginalization.A cutting-edge study grounded in a new feminist arts-based research and intervention tool, Music, Mattering, and Criminalized Young Men propounds an effective new methodology for social research and fundamental human engagement.This series has been renamed to “Emerald Studies in Culture, Crime, Criminal Justice and the Arts” effective for 2025 publications onward.

Sensory Penalities reflects an explosion in explorations of the sensory and disrupts conventional expectations of both form and focus by expanding anthropological practices and craft into the field of criminology and criminological research.In providing accounts of physical/sensorial experiences within sites of surveillance and control, the authors in this edited collection bring elements of research experiences (often absent from existing work) to the fore; the impressions and sensual experiences which remain forever in field notes. In so doing they carve out spaces to consider these places and the ways in which they are theorised anew.The book aims to explore what sensory aspects of experience mean to those engaged in such research, and how they can shape our criminological thinking. What are the sensory textures of these experiences? What do they tell us? How do we communicate them? Finally, what does consideration of these elements tell us about penality?This timely volume challenges and remakes assumptions about what criminology is and should be; more accurately reflecting the post-disciplinary nature of the field.This series has been renamed to “Emerald Studies in Culture, Crime, Criminal Justice and the Arts” effective for 2025 publications onward.