Creative Methodologies for a Mobile Criminology: Walking as Critical Pedagogy

In: Sociological research online, Band 26, Heft 2, S. 247-268

Abstract

In this article, we build upon research that combines walking as a research method alongside participatory and biographical research to teach criminology and generate criminological knowledge and understanding in sensory and corporeal ways. We argue for a mobile criminology that attends to space, place, and time to analyse theories and concepts in criminology, as well as to undertake and apply research. In this article we share a biographical walk with David Honeywell, a convict criminologist, and two examples of criminological walks as pedagogic methods. We suggest that through walking (as a teaching, learning, and research method) we are able to get in touch with the past, present, and future of crime, justice, and punishment in ways that foster knowledge and 'understanding' in corporeal, relational, and material ways forming a critical, cultural, mobile pedagogy. Walking through the city, engaging with spaces, places, and stories associated with crime, is a way of seeing and feeling the history of crime, justice, and punishment in the present, as well as offering critical and imaginative methods for doing criminology in societies on the move.