Preface

We began this book as the second edition of the highly successful Criminology Goes to the Movies.Fifteen years later, that volume has been used in classrooms across the world, with translations in Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, and Turkish.I (Brown) knew its success demanded a good update, one my coauthor would have successfully achieved long ago.I also knew I could not do that work alone, after the loss of her.Nicky Rafter drove the energy and joy of the first volume, a wonderful mentor.Just looking at the book made me ache.A profound lover of theory and film, Nicky wrote prolifically about criminology's possibilities and limits in the fields of feminist criminology, biological criminology, genocide studies, and visual criminology-an extraordinary career that is foundational to the discipline.Knowing I could not tackle this next phase without support, I invited Travis Linnemann, whose own work has been foundational to cultural and visual criminology, to join me and was thrilled when he said yes.We had not yet had the chance to work together, and this collaboration would flow seamlessly, as we each wrote individual chapters and riffed over text and zoom about the volume's themes and possibilities.It quickly became clear to both of us that some things were impossible to do.Neither of us felt comfortable revising or editing Nicky's work.We felt her words should stay as she wrote them.And so much has changed politically, historically since the publication of that book that we both felt there should be major changes to the core arguments in many of the chapters and the kinds of theories represented.Criminology is not the same, and its core premises and foundations are-and should be-contested.To be clear, our work veers, in fact, toward that fraught term, an anti-criminology.In the end, we realized we were writing a new book.Even as we wanted to provide a heavy and accessible critique of criminology, we also knew our arguments were structured by its more critical contributions.We relied on lots of core and emergent frameworks