Towards Visual and Sensory Methodologies in Green Cultural Criminology

Abstract

This chapter discusses the potential usefulness of a visual and sensory methodology for investigating the social perception of environmental crime and harm. Given the scarcity of tools with which to approach these dynamic and elusive phenomena, we focus first on the theoretical and methodological overlaps between green, cultural, visual, and sensory criminologies. We accomplish this by considering two techniques to collect qualitative visual data: interviews-with-visual-materials (also known as photo-elicitation) and itinerant soliloquies-an innovative sociological form of mobile methodology. In doing so, we invite criminologists to reconsider the constitutive relationship between our ways of seeing and our ways of sensing and perceiving the environment in which we live.