Sense and insensibility

Criminology has practiced an uneasy relation with sensorial analysis, technology, and harm. Each of these terms has been subject to significant disciplinary and methodological interest over the past decade, and yet, there are few unifying or consistent thematics in criminology’s theorisation on their relation, meaning, or importance to the discipline when engaged together. Criminology has produced a range of highly specialised and significant interventions; however, it has often come at the cost of a deeper engagement with the sensible and insensible nature of harms implicating technologies. In this chapter, we provide a contemporary, expansive, and sensorial consideration of the ways that technology both invites and invisibilises harm. We argue that a techno-social sensory criminology has much to gain from the insights of postphenomenology, a relational approach to understanding human-technology relations and technological mediation. Postphenomenology is particularly attuned to the sensory dimensions of human-technology relations, arguing that technologies mediate human experiences of the world through magnifying certain senses and diminishing others.