The Criminological Imagination

Abstract

Thus far I have presented arguments about the place and role of imaginative criminologies and fictional social realities within the criminological field. It has been argued that fiction offers much more than a fund of examples of criminological ideas. Fictional realities allow us to reflect critically on the process of producing criminological knowledge through engaging in analysis. Fictional realities are objects that we can investigate and explore through the systematic use of the concepts central to criminology. The criminological imagination, the focus of this chapter, is the practice of a disciplined imagination. This disciplined creativity—the considered and systematic operation of the analytic languages we have at our disposal—enables the production of holistic and robust accounts of social phenomena and the extraction of criminological insights from traditional and nontraditional sources of data. The imaginative criminology of cultural criminologists, Rafter, and to a far greater degree Ruggiero illustrates that fictional realities have an important role to play within criminology.

For most of us, the use of our imagination seems to contradict everything we have been taught about neutrality, rational thought, and objective, dispassionate observation.

To many, rational, scientific inquiry and imagination are diametrically opposed. Scientific inquiry produces true knowledge of events and things, while imagination results in fantasy and fiction.

—Karen Anderson, Sociology: A Critical Introduction