Abstract
Narratives are a constitutive part of the talk of crime. Whenever an event is interpreted as “crime” and reactions to it are determined, stories are established. Events are described, responsibilities ascribed, justifications sought, alternative interpretations evaluated, etc. In other words, crime is contested by devising and rejecting narratives. Narratives are linguistic and cultural patterns of the construction of crime that organise the production of crime. By “patterns” we mean that narratives do not simply exist. They are established and negotiated in social and institutional processes. Some narratives can be established in these processes in the longer term, others will be forgotten or wither. This is a conflictual process. But what exactly it means to link narratives and conflicts in the context of criminality and punishment has hardly been examined in detail so far, and this is what this volume seeks to illuminate.
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Notes
- 1.
A good example can be found in the context of prisons: In this setting, a “conversion story” (Järvinen 2000) can be regarded as a hegemonic expectation that prisoners are facing. According to this narrative figure, an—institutionally accepted—life story implies an (apparently) inevitable decline in which the “remorseful” narrator has hit “rock bottom” but now is “ready to better him- or herself”. This narrative is sometimes opposed by stories told by prisoners that may follow a similar plot, but in which the narrators prove to be “headstrong” and far more self-determined actors than the rather limited narrative rules of the prison would usually enable them to be: They reject the institutional expectations and the associated subject positions for themselves; the narrators thus “saddle up” on hegemonic narratives, but rewrite them individually (cf. Schmidt 2016, p. 73).
- 2.
We refer here to Max Weber (1904) and the controversy around his demand for “objectivity” and about the possibility or necessity of making normative judgements in research. The dispute continues to this day. We deliberately do not reconstruct it, but merely refer to aspects that are significant for a narratively oriented criminology.
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Althoff, M., Dollinger, B., Schmidt, H. (2020). Fighting for the “Right” Narrative: Introduction to Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment. In: Althoff, M., Dollinger, B., Schmidt, H. (eds) Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47236-8_1
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