Video Methods, Green Cultural Criminology, and the Anthropocene: SANCTUARY as a Case Study

ABSTRACT

Documentary criminology is a burgeoning, open-ended methodological technique that crafts and depicts sensuous knowledge from the lived experiences of crime, transgression, and harm. This ‘video ethnography paper’ examines my 74 minute documentary, SANCTUARY, as a case study to demonstrate how documentary criminology draws upon green cultural criminology, video methods, and sensory studies to provide an experiential understanding of crime (in this case, against donkeys) and rehabilitation in the contested notion of an ‘anthropocene’ epoch. I trace how documentary criminology can evoke and enact the lived experiences of “donkey rehabilitation” as sensuous scholarship.

Notes

¹ SANCTUARY can viewed at the following link: https://vimeo.com/176517219 with the password: greenculture.

² I employ the term “harm” as a shorthand for these three concepts –crime, harm, and transgression–throughout the rest of this article. Although “harm” is the central issue confronted in Donkey, documentary criminology may be used equally effectively to approach all three concepts.

³ A notable difference between green criminology and green cultural criminology is how the former focuses on a broad array of political, economic, ecological and corporate infrastructures that enact harm against the environment, food production and animals, whereas the latter explores the impact of cultural production and consumption, mediated dynamics, and symbolism of the social construction of harm.

⁴ Documentary criminology is a theoretical and methodological sensibility that actively enacts and produces media as sensuous scholarship, whereas visual criminology examines and interprets pre-existing visual representations of crime such as images and videos. Visual ethnography is understood as a research method emerging from the social sciences to gain a deeper understanding of social life through lived experience and its visual representation.

⁵ An exception to where one encounters the “smells” of criminology is Chura, David (Chura 2011). I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine. Beacon Press. Boston.

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Notes on contributors

David Redmon

DAVID REDMON’S documentaries have screened internationally in festivals such as Sundance, Toronto, Rotterdam, CPH, Cinema du Reel, Visions du Reel, RIDM, MoMA, and Viennale Film Festivals, and television on POV, BBC, CBC, DR, ARTE, and NHK. His films have been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Sundance Institute, Cinereach and other organizations. A former Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University with a PhD in sociology from the University at Albany, State University of New York, David Redmon is now a lecturer in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK where he teaches video ethnography and criminology.