Alternative Iconographies on Crime: Questioning Chronotopes of Harm and Reparation

EHU Module "Sociology of Crime and Deviance" (3 ECTS)

Gema Varona, University of the Basque Country

AIMS

-To invite participants to critically interrogate the foundational categories through which criminology has historically constructed its objects of inquiry — the offender, the victim, and the broader constellation of criminal (in)justice stakeholders. Rather than accepting these categories as given, participants will be encouraged to denaturalise them, attending to the affective, relational, and often non-rational dimensions of social control that conventional criminological frameworks tend to obscure or render illegible. In doing so, the course repositions subjectivity, embodiment, and relationality as methodologically productive sites of inquiry at the micro, meso and macro levels.

-To examine the particular difficulties that arise when attempting to identify, name, mitigate, and respond to harm in organisational and institutional settings — spaces where responsibility is typically diffuse, accountability mechanisms are structurally weak, and victim-survivors frequently remain invisible or unrecognised. Participants will explore how institutional architectures shape the conditions under which harm is produced, sustained, and contested.

-To engage with emerging critical frameworks in criminological thought, with particular attention to transformative justice and its conceptual and political divergences from restorative justice. While restorative justice tends to operate within existing legal and institutional structures — focusing on repairing the harm between identifiable parties — transformative justice foregrounds the structural conditions that generate harm in the first place, demanding not merely restoration but fundamental reconfiguration of the social relations and power arrangements implicated in wrongdoing. 

METHODOLOGY

The course adopts a pluralistic and reflexive methodological orientation, drawing on qualitative, interpretive, and arts-based approaches to knowledge production. Recognising that dominant criminological methods have often reproduced the very exclusions they purport to study, the course privileges approaches capable of capturing complexity, ambiguity, and situated contradictory experiences. These include critical discourse analysis, narrative and biographical methods, visual, cultural and sensory criminology, participatory action research, and ethnographic sensibilities. Students will also engage with abolitionist, feminist, and decolonial epistemologies as frameworks that not only critique existing justice systems but actively generate alternative imaginaries of harm and repair. Finally, dynamic and collective formats of evaluation, such as elaborating analyses of case studies, will be encouraged.