Book review: Rob White, Climate Change Criminology
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480620914086 |
| Author | Bill McClanahan |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
416 Theoretical Criminology 24(2)
children together? The answers to such questions would have provided important
insight into how family dynamics change and shift in response to and in the wake of
IPV/A.
I also think the book would have benefitted from an intersectional perspective and
analysis given that one-third of the sample consisted of women from various ethnic
and racial groups. One of the Latina participants, in particular, repeatedly made trou-
bling comments about “Latino culture” (e.g. “Latinas more than any other group stay
in abusive relationships because of religion, because the women don’t work, and
because of the culture”, p. 48). It would have been nice to see these types of comments
situated within the larger body of intersectional work that complicates such essentialist
perspectives.
Overall, I think Journeys: Resilience and Growth for Survivors of Intimate Partner
Abuse is a clear and engaging book that is accessible to individuals from a variety of
backgrounds, including students, advocates, survivors, and researchers. Indeed, I
strongly recommend it to anyone who is committed to ending violence against women
and girls.
Rob White, Climate Change Criminology, Bristol University/Policy Press: Bristol, 2018; 200 pp.:
9781529203974, £21.99 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Bill McClanahan, Eastern Kentucky University, USA
In the decades since the emergence and subsequent rise of green criminology, the climate
crisis—or, really, public and social knowledge of the scope of the crisis—has risen more
or less alongside it. Supplanting its forebears—nuclear destruction, ozone damage, “pol-
lution”, and so on—in the public imagination as the existential threat of the day, climate
change is, clearly, the most immediately salient threat to global social, political, eco-
nomic, and ecological order. Green criminology has mostly responded and reacted as
expected, with climate change claiming territory in just about every research agenda,
article, chapter, and syllabus. More traditional criminological thinking is also increas-
ingly grappling with the effects, either speculative or realized, of climate change on
crime and crime rates. With the ongoing rise in public knowledge of the extent of the
climate crisis and the increased visibility of sociocultural responses to the crisis like
Extinction Rebellion and other activist-led “climate justice” movements, it is inevitable
that climate change will continue to reign as the dominant issue in criminological con-
versations surrounding environmental harm.
As is so often the case, though, the published canon finds itself lagging behind the
issues as they are known and lived on the ground. This is a particularly frustrating prob-
lem for those of us teaching at the intersection of climate change and criminology who
often struggle to find suitable readings to build a syllabus around (much less a single
volume such as Climate Change Criminology that can, more or less, serve as the sole or
primary text for an undergraduate course). Enter Rob White, whose contributions to
green criminology and the criminology of climate change cannot be overstated, and
To continue reading
Request your trial