Hauntology: An Introduction for Criminologists

In response to the recent ‘spectral turn’ within criminology this book presents, for the first time, a concise, comprehensive, approachable, and critically engaged guide to hauntology for criminological researchers and graduate students.

Hauntology is, in essence, a mode of analysing the repressions, absences and lacks that shape our social world. The book outlines how criminological researchers may welcome hauntings into their work, to escape the ontological tethers of criminological realism and to reveal the importance of absence in their work. Specifically, the book is structured around key criminological themes, from prisons to the environment, and examines how the lens of ‘haunting’ helps unlock new critical enquiry by revealing the voices that are all too often buried. In doing so, it presents an examination of how hauntological concepts can be ‘read’ criminologically as well as addressing how they can be used to expand criminological imagination.

Throughout the book, we use hauntology to amplify the significance of justice within criminology as an intellectual and ethical endeavour. We argue that a spectral attitude bolsters our ability to ‘do justice’ to our research, our questions, our participants, our subjects, our objects, and what counts as criminological knowledge.

The book is guided by the following objectives:

• To introduce the importance of hauntology for encountering the spectres repressed within criminological knowledge and research.
• To outline the key concepts of hauntology to offer new critical insight into their application across the field of criminology.
• To examine the multiple ways hauntology stretches the ontological and epistemological foundations of criminological research.
• To produce an approachable, comprehensive and theoretically driven compendium that both motivates and guides current and future research across all areas of criminology

Hauntology: An Introduction for Criminologists is a guide for criminologists that is designed to, for the first time, help direct future hauntological research and enhanced learning capacity across the discipline of criminology.