Browse Hierarchy CRIM6009: Picturing the Criminal: From Mugshot to Fine Art

This interdisciplinary module offers third-year undergraduate students an advanced-level introduction to the new and burgeoning field of visual criminology. The module draws on literature from the arts and humanities as well as the social sciences as well as the unique art historical and scientific-imaging collections held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, and the University of Oxford's Art History Archive. Students will identify, describe and critically engage with the modern intellectual history of visual criminology including its origins in the birth of criminology as a colonialist social science in the nineteenth century, the iconoclasm of criminology throughout the twentieth century, and its revival in the twenty-first century. By covering this history, the visual is fed and woven back through the criminological canon so that seeing and picturing becomes the primary epistemology or way of thinking and generating knowledge about crime. Students will identify, describe and critically engage with different visual epistemologies or ways of seeing and their attendant ethics from the colonial to digital age. In so doing they will study varied visual media that have been used to represent criminality during that time including sculpture, painting and drawing, photography, and digital technologies all of which are located in either artistic or scientific ideologies (a tension that students will constantly reflect on). Students will interrogate images especially from an intersectional perspective to consider the ways in which race and gender have characterised visualisations of criminality.