An Epistemology of Criminological Cinema

The aim of An Epistemology of Criminological Cinema is to demonstrate the epistemic value of criminological cinema. Criminological cinema refers to works of cinema that deploy mythic storytelling and take crime or social harm or the control of crime or social harm as their subject. The epistemic value that we demonstrate is twofold. First, criminological cinema exploits features of the cinematic mode of representation (which includes both film and television) to reinvent, recreate, or reconstruct conceptions of crime or harm. Second, criminological cinema exploits features of the cinematic mode of representation to stage particular reinventions, recreations, or reconstructions of crime and harm as psychological and political imperatives. Our case for the epistemic value of criminological cinema is made by means of an analysis that integrates the methods of critical criminology and analytic philosophy, developed from the combination of our previous research. This method is applied to three different conceptions of justice in three different cinematic works.