CrimScapes: Navigating citizenship through European landscapes of criminalisation

The CrimScapes project explores the expanding application of criminal law, crime control measures and imaginaries of (il)legality as responses to, and producers of, a growing politics of threat across the European region. Given the inherent tensions between democratic processes and ever-expanding legal regulations, the project investigates this reliance on criminalisation as a challenge to the participatory nature of democratic societies, and as possible symptoms and causes of the general sense of turbulence dominating much of economic, social and political life today. It analyses the motivations behind, and implications of, criminalisation for the varied actors affected by and (re)producing landscapes of criminalisation (i.e. crimscapes).

With the support of secondary literature, archival research and interviews, project members will develop CrimeLines (i.e. genealogical timelines) of different European crimscapes (of drug use, migration, sex work, infectious diseases, prisons, LGBT identities, and hate speech). Ethnographic fieldwork will then enable conceptualising the citizenship dynamics emerging in the navigation of democratic participation and freedoms with legal regulation and measures of crime control. Building on this, researchers will highlight and open for discussion dilemmas of democratic governance so as to enhance actors’ lived realities, rights-claims and desired futures.