Table Of ContentConflicting
Narratives of Crime
and Punishment
Edited by
Martina Althoff
Bernd Dollinger
Holger Schmidt
Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment
Martina Althoff · Bernd Dollinger ·
Holger Schmidt
Editors
Conflicting
Narratives of Crime
and Punishment
Editors
Martina Althoff Bernd Dollinger
Department of Criminal Law Department of Education & Psychology
& Criminology University of Siegen
University of Groningen Siegen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Groningen, The Netherlands
Holger Schmidt
Department of Social Education,
Adult Education and Early Childhood
Education (ISEP)
TU Dortmund University
Dortmund, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
ISBN 978-3-030-47235-1 ISBN 978-3-030-47236-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47236-8
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Contents
1 Fighting for the “Right” Narrative: Introduction
to Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment 1
Martina Althoff, Bernd Dollinger and Holger Schmidt
Section I Foundation
2 Counter-Narratives of Crime and Punishment 23
Michael Bamberg and Zachary Wipff
3 Small Stories Research and Narrative Criminology:
‘Plotting’ an Alliance 43
Alex Georgakopoulou
4 Public Narratives of Crime and Criminal Justice:
Connecting ‘Small’ and ‘Big’ Stories to Make Public
Narratives Visible 63
Martina Y. Feilzer
v
vi Contents
Section II Popular and Everyday Narrations of Crime
and Punishment
5 Crime and Narration: The Creation of (In)Security
in Everyday Life 87
Katharina Eisch-Angus
6 Popular and Visual Narratives of Punishment
in Museum Settings 113
Hannah Thurston
7 Conflicting Counternarratives of Crime and Justice
in US Superhero Comics 139
Daniel Stein
8 Sympathies and Scandals: (Counter-)Narratives
of Criminality and Policing in Inter-war Britain 161
John Carter Wood
Section III Crime Narratives in Social and Criminal Justice
9 ‘Let’s Put Human Rights Right’: (Counter) Narratives
About Human Rights in the UK Popular Press 183
Lieve Gies
10 Files as Prototypical Master Narratives 201
Mechthild Bereswill, Henrike Buhr
and Patrik Müller-Behme
11 Practical Narratives in the Criminal Law Process:
The Suspect’s Statement 219
Martha Komter
Contents vii
Section IV M edia Outrages and Narrations of Gender,
Crime and Migration
12 Competing Narratives in the Nexus
of Migration-Crime-Gender 239
Maria De Angelis
13 Stories of Gender and Migration, Crime
and Security: Between Outrage and Denial 259
Martina Althoff
Index 279
Notes on Contributors
Martina Althoff is an Associate Professor of Criminology at
the University of Groningen, Department of Criminal Law and
Criminology. Focus of her research is the political and social reactions
to criminality, societal effects of the criminal justice system, gendered
aspects of crime and Feminist Criminology. She published various arti-
cles, book chapters and academic books in English, Dutch and German.
Michael Bamberg received his M.Phil. from the University of York
(Linguistics) and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley (Psychology). Previous to his
appointment as Professor of Psychology at Clark University (USA), he
held teaching positions in Sociology (FU Berlin), in Linguistics at the
University of York (UK), and Foreign Languages at Tongji University
(Shanghai) and Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (Guangzhou),
as well as Universität Saarbrücken (Germany). For 2020, he is on a
Fulbright Distinguished Chair Scholarship with the Adam Mickiewicz
University in Poznan, Poland. His scholarly interests are in narrative,
identity and qualitative methodology.
ix
x Notes on Contributors
Mechthild Bereswill is a Professor for Sociology at Kassel University,
Department of Human Sciences, Institute of Social Policy and Social
Welfare. Her fields of research include gender studies, social problems
and social control, qualitative methodologies.
Henrike Buhr is a research assistant at Kassel University, Department
of Human Sciences, Institute of Social Policy and Social Welfare. Fields
of research include Qualitative Research, Biography Studies, Social
Problems and Social Control.
Maria De Angelis is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Beckett
University, UK. She holds a Ph.D. in her specialist area of human
trafficking, and her research examines intersectionality across crim-
inal, immigration and social policy. She is on the board of CIRN—
the Centre for International Research on Narrative at St. Thomas’
University, Canada—and is an active member of the Women Crime
and Criminal Justice Network (British Society of Criminology). Her
current project is one of impact and involves transforming wom-
en’s narratives published in Social Policy and Society (2019) into an
audio-photo-art exhibition for display in city-wide public spaces.
Bernd Dollinger is a Professor of Social Pedagogy at the University of
Siegen, Germany, Department of Pedagogy & Psychology. His fields of
research are youth crime, history and theory of social pedagogy, welfare
policy. His recent publication includes Dollinger, B. (2020): Changing
Narratives of Youth Crime: From Social Causes to Threats to the Social.
London: Routledge.
Katharina Eisch-Angus is a Professor at the Institute of Cultural
Anthropology and European Ethnology of the University of Graz,
Austria. Major research interests are in the fields of contemporary
everyday cultures, from the anthropology of borders and difference to
processes of securitization and subjectivation, as expressed in collec-
tive memory or everyday narration. A methodological emphasis is on
multi-perspective ethnographic, semiotic and ethno-psychoanalytic
approaches. Recent publications include Absurde Angst. Narrationen
der Sicherheitsgesellschaft [Absurd Anxiety. Narrations of the Society
of Security], Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019; Der Alltag der (Un)
Notes on Contributors xi
sicherheit. Ethnographisch-kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf die
Sicherheitsgesellschaft [The Everyday of (In)Security. Perspectives of
Ethnography and Cultural].
Martina Y. Feilzer is Professor in Criminology and Criminal Justice
at Bangor University. Her research focuses on public perceptions of
criminal justice at local, national and European levels; the relationship
between the media and public opinion of criminal justice; questions of
legitimacy, trust in justice and penal policy; and comparative and his-
torical criminal justice research. She is Co-Director of WISERD (Wales
Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data) at Bangor and
Co-Director of the Welsh Centre for Crime and Social Justice.
Alex Georgakopoulou is Professor of Discourse Analysis & Socio-
linguistics, King’s College London. She has developed small stories
research, a paradigm for examining the role of everyday life stories in
the (re)formation of social relations and identity politics. She has (co)
authored several books that include Analyzing Narrative (with Anna De
Fina, 2012, Cambridge University Press) & ‘Quantified Storytelling:
A Narrative Analysis of Metrics and Algorithms’ (With Stefan Iversen
and Carsten Stage, Palgrave, forthcoming). Her latest study of small
stories has been carried out within the ERC project ‘Life-writing of the
moment: The sharing and updating self on social media’ (www.ego-
media.org).
Lieve Gies is an Associate Professor in the School of Media,
Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester. Her
research focuses on human rights in the media and media representa-
tions of the law more generally.
Martha Komter is ‘research fellow’ at The Netherlands Institute for
de Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR). She has published
widely on various aspects of language use in the criminal process, espe-
cially on interaction in the courtroom and in the police interrogating
room. Her research materials include audio and video recordings of
authentic police interrogations and trials. The analyses of the courtroom
materials have been published as: ‘Dilemma’s in the Courtroom. A Study
of Trials of Violent Crime in the Netherlands.’ Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence
