Boredom, Crime and Criminology

Abstract

Under the dehumanizing conditions of modernism, boredom has come to pervade the experience of everyday life. This collective boredom has spawned not only moments of illicit excitement—that is, ephemeral crimes committed against boredom itself—but larger efflorescences of political and cultural rebellion. In the same way, the machinery of modern criminology has organized a vast collectivity of boredom buttressed by rationalized methodologies and analytic abstraction. Against this institutionalized boredom, cultural criminology offers a rebellion of its own, and with it the possibility of intellectual excitement by way of methodological innovation, momentary insight and human engagement.