Book review: Richard Quinney, Things Once Seen and Kenneth D Tunnell, Once Upon a Place: The Fading of Community in Rural Kentucky
| Author | Sandra Walklate |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480613494303 |
| Published date | 01 May 2014 |
| Date | 01 May 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Theoretical Criminology
2014, Vol. 18(2) 241 –256
© The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1362480613494303
tcr.sagepub.com
Book reviews
Richard Quinney, Things Once Seen, Borderland Books: Madison, WI, 2008; 182 pp.: 9780976878148,
US$60.00
Kenneth D Tunnell, Once Upon a Place: The Fading of Community in Rural Kentucky, Xlibris: Bloomington,
IN, 2011; 123 pp.: 9781462875658
Reviewed by: Sandra Walklate, University of Liverpool, UK
Awareness of the centrality of the visual for making sense of the social world has been a
feature of the sociological imagination for over three decades. However, thinking about
the visual has been a much later arrival to the criminological agenda. The reasons for this
may be due to the dominance of the need to count in mainstream criminological work
alongside the dangers, historically and contemporarily, associated with the power of
images within particular criminological agendas. The use of photographs as evidence of
Lombrosian ‘abnormalities’ in the criminal or the role of neuroscience imaging of the
murderer’s brain are but two examples in which the dangers of how images might be
made sense of and the uses to which they might be put are more than apparent. However,
as some of the work emanating from cultural criminology and the two volumes under
review here serve to illustrate, there is much to be learned from visual representations
particularly as a way of accessing and appreciating the contemporary nature of the social
world. Each of these volumes does this, but they are quite different in the way in which
they seek to convey the nature of the social world.
In Once Upon a Place, Kenneth Tunnell’s engagement with rural Kentucky combines
a very accessible, evidenced commentary on social change and its impact on tobacco
farming in a manner that focuses on the economically distressed parts of the Appalachian
region. This book reveals a compelling story about how, as the family farm dies, Wal-Mart
America arrives in its wake. The impoverishment of communities materially, culturally
and symbolically, leads Tunnell to offer an analysis of these changes in terms of social
disorganization theory. This draws attention to the impact of the patterns of employment,
social mobility and housing that result in those remaining in the remnants of the commu-
nities so affected, constituting a real challenge for the resources available to support them.
This analysis is illustrated and supported by a series of colour photographs, taken by
Tunnell himself, that afford a visual and almost tangible record of the neglect following
494303TCR18210.1177/1362480613494303Theoretical CriminologyBook reviews
2014
To continue reading
Request your trial