Cultural Criminology (CultCrim)
What drives people to push boundaries, break norms, or venture into the forbidden? Researchers in cultural criminology explore how deviance, crime, and subcultures are shaped through the interaction between individuals, culture, and society.
Why is it that we humans challenge and test the boundaries of both life and society, including our own? How do we go about this? What is it that lures us, and what pushes us towards behaviours that the surrounding society labels as deviant or even criminal? And, not least, how do such behaviours reflect both specific subcultural logics and broader social and cultural tendencies in society?
These questions make up some of the central interests of Lund University’s Cultural Criminology research environment—an open and explorative environment made up of researchers with different interests and backgrounds, including social anthropology, cultural sociology, gender studies, and critical criminology, and with its roots in our Master’s Programme in Cultural Criminology.
Within the research environment, we are driven by curiosity and playfulness when it comes to scientific boundaries—methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary alike. This is an approach that takes shape in our primarily ethnographic research (online as well as offline) across a wide range of areas, including gang crime, graffiti, risk-taking, surveillance, violence, trauma, detectives, policing, migration, and music-based subcultures.
Everyone is welcome. Of course. So please get in touch and come join us if you, too, think it is interesting and important to understand how the boundaries of society are drawn, explored, and challenged – not only to prevent, but to actually understand what we sometimes call crime and, through this, understand central aspects of the times we all live in.
As an old French sociologist once put it:
“We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it”.
Indeed, criminality and deviance tells us at least as much about “us” as it does about “them”.