True crime journalism has long relied on crime's archive - police records, court proceedings, media reports, and witness testimony - to construct narratives of crime and justice. While existing scholarship has examined the narrative and ethical dimensions of true crime media, less attention has been paid to how emerging formats engage with and reshape crime's archive through journalistic practice. Focussing on newsroom-produced true crime podcasts, this article argues that such productions do not merely draw on crime's archive but actively rework and extend it through their investigation and circulation. Drawing on archival scholarship that conceptualises archives as dynamic, power-laden sites of meaning-making, the article examines how archival materials are selected, framed, mobilised, and supplemented in podcast investigations of unresolved crimes and contested convictions. Using close analytical listening and systematic coding of episodes from three Australian podcast series, the study analyses how journalists exercise interpretive authority over archival records by framing evidentiary fragments within serialised, affective narratives. In doing so, these podcasts destabilise conventional understandings of crime's archive as a bounded repository of legal fact, foregrounding its contingent, mediated, and contested nature. They demonstrate how podcasts themselves become part of crime's archive by narrating and preserving particular interpretations of crime and justice, shaping relations between journalistic authority, legal meaning, and public memory.
This study presents a netnographic exploration of perkin , a stigmatising slur from Chilean prison argot that has migrated into mainstream digital memes. Originating in the carceral world to denote an inmate subjected to domestic servitude, the term now thrives in Chilean social media, creating a paradox: a word born in the most restricted physical environment flourishes in the most open digital spaces. Bridging philosophy of language with cultural criminology, we position perkin as a slur whose derogatory force stems from enacting power imbalances and assigning subordinate roles. Through netnographic analysis of Chilean memes, we examine how perkin is deployed to mock submission, reinforce informal hierarchies, and perform transgressive identity. Our findings indicate that the slur’s potency lies in tapping into subterranean values—rejection of subjugation, respect for anti-authority shrewdness—latent within the Chilean digital practices documented in our corpus. The memetic life of perkin demonstrates that slurs’ offencive force is dynamically negotiated, challenging static philosophical models whilst revealing digital spaces as crucial arenas for performing cultural power in the online contexts examined here.
This paper develops a theoretical framework for cinematic victimology as phenomenology. We argue that cinematic fiction can offer insight into the experience of victimisation that is difficult to access through standard victimological methods, given the double hermeneutic that shapes both the telling and the interpretation of victim experience. Drawing on McGregor’s tripartite framework for the criminological value of narrative fiction, we contend that fiction’s phenomenological value for victimology is not parallel to its mimetic and counterfactual qualities but is constituted by their interplay. The mimetic quality of film immerses the viewer in experiential detail; its counterfactual quality performs a function analogous to a phenomenological epoché, suspending the viewer’s ordinary evaluative stance towards victims and creating the conditions under which the structure of victimisation can be attended to from within. Together they generate experiential knowledge that neither delivers alone. We develop this argument through an analysis of Christopher Nolan’s Memento . Its reverse chronology simultaneously reproduces the protagonist’s epistemic condition in the viewer and strips the viewer of the retrospective coherence that would ordinarily allow evaluation from outside. Leonard Shelby’s inability to form new memories serves as a limit case for key features of the phenomenology of victimisation: temporal confinement, the destruction of connection, and the complexity of re-storying. His revenge quest, isolated from the considerations that ordinarily complicate it by his condition, reveals revenge as primarily concerned with the avenger’s own shattered identity rather than with the relationship with the offender. It is an ultimately contradictory attempt to structure identity. The analysis demonstrates that cinematic fiction can serve as a methodological instrument for accessing the victim experience.
This article examines how sound shapes fear and perceptions of safety in the built environment, arguing for the integration of sonic dimensions into criminological research. Drawing on recontextualised qualitative data, supplemented by audio field recordings and photographs, we revisit participant-identified sites to explore how auditory cues mediate experiences of unease and security. Methodologically, the article advances an innovative, participant-directed, multi-sensory approach that combines secondary qualitative analysis with situated sonic and visual methods. The analysis highlights the affective role of sonic environments - from familiar residential quiet to 'sounds out of place' - and develops three analytic dualisms: experiential and expressive, quiet and silence, and thick and thin places. In doing so, the article foregrounds fear of crime as a situated, sensory, and atmospheric experience shaped through sonic encounters with place.
This article proposes auto-true crime as a distinct hybrid mode of first-person true crime writing, one in which ethical meaning is negotiated through the narrating subject’s position as an affectively implicated witness. I formulate this mode through close readings of Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014), which are regarded as important and contested works of true crime literature. I argue that Garner’s trial narratives depart from the genre’s conventional claims to objectivity by placing the writer’s own perceptions and judgements at the heart of their account. Her narratives move between two modes of ethical witnessing: acts of consolation grounded in proximity and consent, and a practice of accountability grounded in restraint.
