Overview

The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology reimagines what criminology can become when we take the senses seriously. Centring the sensory as fundamental to the experience of harm, justice, and resistance, this groundbreaking volume brings together 29 chapters from scholars across disciplines, career stages, and geographies. Together, they explore how power is heard, felt, inhaled, touched, and moved through, from courtrooms and prisons to museums, marine ecologies, colonial archives, transitional spaces, high‑crime zones, and urban streets. The Handbook opens up new pathways for criminological inquiry, offering rich, situated analysis of how the sensory shapes and is shaped by structures of criminalisation, exclusion, and survival. Contributors engage themes including punishment, victimhood, environmental harm, archival memory, decolonial justice, and innovative methodologies. Rather than offering a prescriptive vision, the volume offers a provocation: to expand the criminological imagination and embrace new ways of knowing, sensing, and intervening. This Handbook is an essential reading for students, scholars, and early career researchers in criminology, sociology, law, anthropology, geography, gender studies, politics, and cultural studies, as well as those interested in decolonial approaches, sensory methods, and interdisciplinary justice research.

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9781032618203

Table of Contents

Reviews

Multi-layered and lavishly sensorial, this splendid volume assembles a set of provocative works that unveil intriguing facets of sensory criminology. Interlacing arguments drawn from different regions of the globe, the authors pique readers to consider how sensory rhetorics and practices crystalize how we approach justice, spatial and temporal politics, power and violence. Professor Kelvin E.Y. Low: National University of Singapore: Author of Sensory Anthropology: Culture and Experience in Asia (2023) This incredibly important and absolutely stunning volume brings readers to criminology through the senses. Its editors and contributors skilfully show how foregrounding sensory experience, narratives, spatialities and temporalities invokes new moves towards necessary decolonising, and gender focused, environmental, and arts based justice. This is a must-read for all scholars and students of criminology! Laureate Professor Sarah Pink, PhD, FASSA, Dr h.c. Technology (Malmo), Dr h.c. Philosophy (Halmstad), Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, Director, Emerging Technologies Research Lab & FUTURES Hub, Leader Mobilities Focus Area and People Programme, ARC CoE for ADM+S, Monash Art, Design and Architecture & Faculty of Information Technology Sensory criminology has generated a great deal of noise (and, indeed, feels) over the past few years, because justice has always been about gut-level emotion. This state-of-the-art collection of new research directions in this expanding field vividly demonstrates just how much we have been missing with traditional methodologies up until now. Professor Shadd Maruna, Head of Sociology, Social Policy & Criminology, University of Liverpool

Author Information

Kate Herrity is a fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, and Co‑Director of King’s Entrepreneurship Laboratory. Her work has focused on using a sensory lens to explore confinement and social control, as in Sensory Penalities, co‑edited with Bethany Schmidt and Jason Warr. She has a particular interest in the social significance of sound – as well as music – in prison, the focus of the monograph of her PhD Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown and the forthcoming Sound and Detention: Towards Critical Listening, Sonic Citizenship and Social Justice co‑edited with Lucy Cathcart Frödén and Áine Mangaoang. She likes to work at the meeting places and boundaries between criminology and other fields and disciplines. Kanupriya Sharma is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham. She recently completed her PhD in Criminology at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge with the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Her research sits at the intersections of imprisonment, caste, gender, kinship, and state power, with a particular focus on how socio‑cultural norms, moral frameworks, and structural inequalities shape criminalisation, punishment, and the lived experiences of incarcerated women in South Asia. She is especially committed to decolonial methodologies and culturally responsive ethnographic practices. Kanupriya is the founder and convenor of the Cambridge Decolonising Criminology Network, an intellectual initiative that challenges Eurocentric frameworks in criminology, amplifies marginalised voices, and promotes decolonial, Indigenous, and subaltern approaches to criminological theory and research. Janani Umamaheswar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. Her research is broadly in the areas of social inequality, punishment and incarceration, and qualitative research methods. Her work has been published in journals such as Justice Quarterly, the British Journal of Criminology, Punishment & Society, and Theoretical Criminology. Jason Warr is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include penology, sociology of power, narrative and sensory criminology, and the philosophy of science. His most recent book is concerned with forensic psychologists employed within the prisons of England and Wales: Forensic Psychologists: Prisons, Power, and Vulnerability.

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