Overview

The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology reimagines what criminology can become when we take the senses seriously. Centring the sensory as fundamental to the experience of harm, justice, and resistance, this groundbreaking volume brings together 29 chapters from scholars across disciplines, career stages, and geographies. Together, they explore how power is heard, felt, inhaled, touched, and moved through, from courtrooms and prisons to museums, marine ecologies, colonial archives, transitional spaces, high‑crime zones, and urban streets. The Handbook opens up new pathways for criminological inquiry, offering rich, situated analysis of how the sensory shapes and is shaped by structures of criminalisation, exclusion, and survival. Contributors engage themes including punishment, victimhood, environmental harm, archival memory, decolonial justice, and innovative methodologies. Rather than offering a prescriptive vision, the volume offers a provocation: to expand the criminological imagination and embrace new ways of knowing, sensing, and intervening. This Handbook is an essential reading for students, scholars, and early career researchers in criminology, sociology, law, anthropology, geography, gender studies, politics, and cultural studies, as well as those interested in decolonial approaches, sensory methods, and interdisciplinary justice research.

Full Product Details

Author:   Kate Herrity ,  Kanupriya Sharma ,  Janani Umamaheswar ,  Jason Warr
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.453kg
ISBN:  

9781032618203

ISBN 10:   1032618205
Pages:   452
Publication Date:   04 February 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Section i: Sensory Criminology: Expanding our Imagination, Introduction: Sensing Violence: Traces, Echoes, and Afterlives 1. Listening to Donald Trump’s Voice: ‘Fight like hell!’, the Capitol Hill Riots, and the Spectre of Teleprompter Trump 2. ‘SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH’: Sound, Silence and Gender-Based Violence 3. The Sound of Violence 5. War, Colonialism and the Senses: “You can’t unsee or unhear that shit” Section II: Coloniality, Imperialism, and the Senses Introdcution: Recognising Abhorrent Legacies: Lessons for Sensory Criminology 5. Doing Justice Differently: A Pan-Africanist Perspective 6. “I’ll Make You Shit!”: Olfactory Othering and the Necropolitics of Colonial Prisons 7. The Sensory Aspects of Abhorrent Heritage in South Africa 8. Decolonizing Sensory Rhetorics and Activism in Africana Prison Memoirs Section III: Sensory, Narrative, and the Arts Introduction: Reimagining Justice through Creative Encounters and Sensory Knowing 9. Black light. Drawing, Music and Theatre as Sensory Practices in the Encounter Between Inmates and University Students 10. Crackle and Flicker: Music and Multisensory Experiences in Prison 11. Seeing Museums as Criminological Spaces: An Affective Tale of Two Museum Visits 12. ‘Verily in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest:’ Sensory Criminology, Islamic Auditory Traditions, and the Rehabilitation of Offenders Section IV: Sensing (In)Justice Introduction: From the Courtroom to the Street: The Sensory Dimensions of Racialised (In)justice 13. Conflicting Senses, Victims, and the Courtroom: the case of Cindy Gladue 14. The Sensory Effects of Racial Profiling in Berlin’s KBO’s 15. Racialized Punishment and the Sensorial Symbolism of Death Row for America’s Black Gangster Class Section V: Environmental Harm and the Senses Introduction: “The Way the Soil Crumbled in Their Hands"": Sensing Environmental Harms 16. Seeing and Sensing Environmental Harm: The Death of the British Countryside 17. The Sensory Ocean: Exploring Noise and Light Pollution as Blue Crime 18. Sensitising Criminology to Experiences of Environmental Noise Section 6: Space, Place, and the Sensory Introduction: Vivid and Vibrant Criminological Landscapes: Sense and Space 19. Dispossessed Realities: Houselessness, and Spatial Violence 20. Release from Prison Day 21. ""I can't breathe"" Housing, Masculinities and Violence in Cape Town, South Africa 22. Scrutinising Social Control in the City through the Senses Section 7: Time, Justice, and the Sensory Introduction: 23. Sitting, Seeing and Getting Lost: The Sensory Aesthetics of Latvia’s Women’s Prison 24. Time, Temporality, and Chronoception 25. It’s a Circus: The Production of Domestic Violence Proceedings in Lower Courts of Mumbai, India 26. Beholding Justice: Images of Punishment in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Section 8: Sensory Methods Introduction: “They Are Not Like You and I”: Sensory Methods 27. Sense and Insensibility: How Technologies Invite and Invisibilise Harm 28. Audio Criminology: Broadening the Criminological Imagination Through the Use of Audio Methods 29. ‘Still feels like jail’: Sensing Danger, Bleakness and Friendship in a State-Run Home For Boys

Reviews

Multi-layered and lavishly sensorial, this splendid volume assembles a set of provocative works that unveil intriguing facets of sensory criminology. Interlacing arguments drawn from different regions of the globe, the authors pique readers to consider how sensory rhetorics and practices crystalize how we approach justice, spatial and temporal politics, power and violence. Professor Kelvin E.Y. Low: National University of Singapore: Author of Sensory Anthropology: Culture and Experience in Asia (2023) This incredibly important and absolutely stunning volume brings readers to criminology through the senses. Its editors and contributors skilfully show how foregrounding sensory experience, narratives, spatialities and temporalities invokes new moves towards necessary decolonising, and gender focused, environmental, and arts based justice. This is a must-read for all scholars and students of criminology! Laureate Professor Sarah Pink, PhD, FASSA, Dr h.c. Technology (Malmo), Dr h.c. Philosophy (Halmstad), Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, Director, Emerging Technologies Research Lab & FUTURES Hub, Leader Mobilities Focus Area and People Programme, ARC CoE for ADM+S, Monash Art, Design and Architecture & Faculty of Information Technology Sensory criminology has generated a great deal of noise (and, indeed, feels) over the past few years, because justice has always been about gut-level emotion. This state-of-the-art collection of new research directions in this expanding field vividly demonstrates just how much we have been missing with traditional methodologies up until now. Professor Shadd Maruna, Head of Sociology, Social Policy & Criminology, University of Liverpool

Author Information

Kate Herrity is a fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, and Co‑Director of King’s Entrepreneurship Laboratory. Her work has focused on using a sensory lens to explore confinement and social control, as in Sensory Penalities, co‑edited with Bethany Schmidt and Jason Warr. She has a particular interest in the social significance of sound – as well as music – in prison, the focus of the monograph of her PhD Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown and the forthcoming Sound and Detention: Towards Critical Listening, Sonic Citizenship and Social Justice co‑edited with Lucy Cathcart Frödén and Aine Mangaoang. She likes to work at the meeting places and boundaries between criminology and other fields and disciplines. Kanupriya Sharma is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham. She recently completed her PhD in Criminology at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge with the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Her research sits at the intersections of imprisonment, caste, gender, kinship, and state power, with a particular focus on how socio‑cultural norms, moral frameworks, and structural inequalities shape criminalisation, punishment, and the lived experiences of incarcerated women in South Asia. She is especially committed to decolonial methodologies and culturally responsive ethnographic practices. Kanupriya is the founder of the Cambridge Decolonising Criminology Network, an intellectual initiative that challenges Eurocentric frameworks in criminology, amplifies marginalised voices, and promotes decolonial, Indigenous, and subaltern approaches to criminological theory and research. Janani Umamaheswar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. Her research is broadly in the areas of social inequality, punishment and incarceration, and qualitative research methods. Her work has been published in journals such as Justice Quarterly, the British Journal of Criminology, Punishment & Society, and Theoretical Criminology. Jason Warr is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include penology, sociology of power, narrative and sensory criminology, and the philosophy of science. His most recent book is concerned with forensic psychologists employed within the prisons of England and Wales: Forensic Psychologists: Prisons, Power, and Vulnerability.

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