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Toward a Green-Cultural Criminology of “the Rural”

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Abstract

There are many connections between the various strands of critical criminology. Previously, we highlighted common issues between green and cultural criminology, while also noting some of the ways that each perspective could potentially benefit from cross-fertilization (Brisman and South in Crime Media Cult 9(2):115–135, 2013, Green cultural criminology: constructions of environmental harm, consumerism and resistance to ecocide. Routledge, Oxford, 2014; McClanahan in Crit Criminol. doi:10.1007/s10612-014-9241-8, 2014). In this article, we extend our analysis to consider green, cultural and rural criminologies through the exposition of several key issues, including “the rural” as local context in which exploitative global forces may exercise power; agribusiness and the food/profit chain; farming and the pollution of land, water and air; and finally, cultural/media images and narratives of rural life. We focus more specifically on this final intersectionality through an analysis of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010), analyzing his depictions of rural people, environmental activists, and the rural environment through the issue of mountaintop removal. We conclude our article by identifying several examples of key directions in which the intersectionality of green, cultural and rural criminologies might proceed, including trafficking and abuse of farmworkers, harms associated with the cultivation of quinoa, and a critical interpretation of media and popular narrative depictions of environmental issues within rural contexts.

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Notes

  1. It is noteworthy that the 700,000 acre figure is based on coal company data, which, as geographers have pointed out, likely underestimates the actual extent of impact by as much as 40 % (see, e.g., Geredien 2009a, b).

  2. Because of the radical changes to landscape, culture, and ecological health presented by mountaintop removal mining, the discursive deployment of “reclamation” is a central component of the processes through which mine operators gain social support for extraction. Simply put, without the ecologically empty promise of reclamation, mine operators would likely face much more resistance from the communities affected by mountaintop removal.

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Correspondence to Avi Brisman.

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Our inspiration for the title of this article comes from a paper delivered by Travis Linnemann at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology entitled “Living on the Wrong Side of Town: Toward a Cultural Criminology of the Rural.” Linnemann’s paper engaged Keith Hayward’s “Five Spaces of Cultural Criminology” (Hayward 2012) to draw out the complex geographies of several small towns in the rural Midwest and our article continues in a similar “merging” spirit.

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Brisman, A., McClanahan, B. & South, N. Toward a Green-Cultural Criminology of “the Rural”. Crit Crim 22, 479–494 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-014-9250-7

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