Criminology: Some lines of flight
| Author | Clifford Shearing,Julie Berg |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/26338076211014569 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Criminology: Some lines
of flight
Julie Berg
Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of
Glasgow, UK
Clifford Shearing
Department of Public Law, University of Cape Town, South Africa;
Griffith Institute of Criminology and School of Criminology and
Criminal Justice, Griffith University, Australia; School of
Criminology, University of Montreal, Canada
Abstract
The 40th Anniversary Edition of Taylor, Walton and Young’s New Criminology, published in
2013, opened with these words: ‘The New Criminology was written at a par ticular time and
place, it was a product of 1968 and its aftermath; a world turned upside down’. We are at a
similar moment today. Several developments have been, and are turning, our 21st century
world upside down. Among the most profound has been the emergence of a new earth, that
the ‘Anthropocene’ references, and ‘cyberspace’, a term first used in the 1960s, which James
Lovelock has recently termed a ‘Novacene’, a world that includes both human and artificial
intelligences. We live today on an earth that is proving to be very different to the Holocene
earth, our home for the past 12,000 years. To appreciate the Novacene one need only think
of our ‘smart’ phones. This world constitutes a novel domain of existence that Castells has
conceived of as a terrain of ‘material arrangements that allow for simultaneity of social
practices without territorial contiguity’ – a world of sprawling material infrastructures,
that has enabled a ‘space of flows’, through which massive amounts of information travel.
Like the Anthropocene, the Novacene has brought with it novel ‘harmscapes’, for example,
attacks on energy systems. In this paper, we consider how criminology has responded to
these harmscapes brought on by these new worlds. We identify ‘lines of flight’ that are
Corresponding author:
Julie Berg, Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow, Ivy Lodge, 63 Gibson Street,
Glasgow G12 8LR, UK.
Email: Julie.Berg@glasgow.ac.uk
Journal of Criminology
2021, Vol. 54(1) 21–33
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/26338076211014569
journals.sagepub.com/home/anj
To continue reading
Request your trial