CrimScapes: Navigating citizenship through European landscapes of criminalisation – Crimscape

The CrimScapes project explores the expanding application of criminal law, crime control measures and imaginaries of (il)legality as both responses to, and producers of, the politics of threat and uncertainty that are currently expanding across the European region. Given the inherent tensions between democratic processes and ever-expanding legal regulations, the project investigates this growing reliance on criminal technologies and institutions as a challenge to the participatory nature of democratic societies, and as possible symptoms and causes of the general sense of turbulence that has come to dominate much of economic, social and political life. It works to analytically grasp the motivations behind, and challenges and broader implications of, criminalisation for the variety of actors and practices that shape and reshape entangled crimscapes - i.e. landscapes of criminalisation. With the support of secondary literature, archival research and interviews, project members will develop genealogies of seven intentionally selected European
crimscapes (of migration, hate speech, sex work, surrogacy, the prison context, drug use and LGBT identities and relations). Additional interviews and ethnographic fieldwork will help to identify and conceptualise the strategies, relations and citizenship dynamics of the implicated actors as they negotiate democratic participation and freedoms with legal regulation and measures of control under conditions of criminalisation. Extracting from this empirical data, researchers will then conceptualise, for a variety of publics, the ways in which these actors’ subjectivities, lived realities, rights-claims and desired futures could be better accounted for in processes of democratic governance across the region.