1. Fighting for the ‘right’ narrative: Introduction to Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment
Martina Althoff, Bernd Dollinger, Holger Schmidt (editors)
2. Counter-Narratives of Crime and Punishment
Michael Bamberg, Zachary Wipff
3. Small stories research and narrative criminology: ‘Plotting’ an alliance
Alex Georgakopoulou
4. Public Narratives of Crime and Criminal Justice: Connecting ‘small’ and ‘big’ stories to make public narratives visible
Martina Feilzer
5. Crime and narration. The creation of (in)security in everyday life
Katharina Eisch-Angus
6. Popular and visual narratives of punishment in museum settings
Hannah Thurston
7. Conflicting Counternarratives of Crime and Justice in U.S. Superhero Comics
Daniel Stein
8. Sympathies and Scandals: (Counter-)Narratives of Criminality and Policing in Inter-war Britain
John Carter Wood
9. ‘Let’s put human rights right’: (Counter-)narratives about human rights in the UK popular press
Lieve Gies
10. Files as prototypical master narratives
Mechthild Bereswill, Henrike Buhr, Patrick Müller
11. Practical narratives in the criminal law process: the suspect’s statement
Martha Komter
12. Competing narratives in the nexus of migration-crime-gender
Maria De Angelis
13. Stories of gender and migration, crime and security: Between outrage and denial
Martina Althoff
Martina Althoff is Associate Professor of criminology at the University of Groningen, Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, The Netherlands.
Bernd Dollinger is Professor of social pedagogy at the University of Siegen, Department of Educational Science and Psychology, Germany.
Holger Schmidt is Assistant Professor at the TU Dortmund University, Department of Social Education, Adult Education and Early Childhood Education, Germany.
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.