The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology

The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology reimagines what criminology can become when we take the senses seriously. Centring the sensory as fundamental to the experience of harm, justice, and resistance, this groundbreaking volume brings together 29 chapters from scholars across disciplines, career stages, and geographies. Together, they explore how power is heard, felt, inhaled, touched, and moved through, from courtrooms and prisons to museums, marine ecologies, colonial archives, transitional spaces, high-crime zones, and urban streets.

The Handbook opens up new pathways for criminological inquiry, offering rich, situated analysis of how the sensory shapes and is shaped by structures of criminalisation, exclusion, and survival. Contributors engage themes including punishment, victimhood, environmental harm, archival memory, decolonial justice, and innovative methodologies. Rather than offering a prescriptive vision, the volume offers a provocation: to expand the criminological imagination and embrace new ways of knowing, sensing, and intervening.

This Handbook is an essential reading for students, scholars, and early career researchers in criminology, sociology, law, anthropology, geography, gender studies, politics, and cultural studies, as well as those interested in decolonial approaches, sensory methods, and interdisciplinary justice research.

Kate Herrity is a fellow at King’s College, Cambridge and co-director of King’s Entrepreneurship Laboratory. Her work has focused on using a sensory lens to explore confinement and social control, as in Sensory Penalities, co-edited with Bethany Schmidt and Jason Warr. She has a particular interest in the social significance of sound - as well as music - in prison, the focus of the monograph of her PhD Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown and the forthcoming Sound and Detention: Towards Critical Listening, Sonic Citizenship and Social Justice co-edited with Lucy Cathcart Frödén and Aine Mangaoang. She likes to work at the meeting places and boundaries between criminology and other fields and disciplines.

Kanupriya Sharma is a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham. She recently completed her PhD in Criminology at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge with the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Her research sits at the intersections of imprisonment, caste, gender, kinship, and state power, with a particular focus on how socio-cultural norms, moral frameworks, and structural inequalities shape criminalisation, punishment, and the lived experiences of incarcerated women in South Asia. She is especially committed to decolonial methodologies and culturally responsive ethnographic practices. Kanupriya is the founder of the Cambridge Decolonising Criminology Network, an intellectual initiative that challenges Eurocentric frameworks in criminology, amplifies marginalised voices, and promotes decolonial, Indigenous, and subaltern approaches to criminological theory and research.

Janani Umamaheswar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. Her research is broadly in the areas of social inequality, punishment and incarceration, and qualitative research methods. Her work has been published in journals such as Justice Quarterly, the British Journal of Criminology, Punishment & Society, and Theoretical Criminology.

Jason Warr is an Associate Professor in Criminology, University of Nottingham with research interests in penology, sociology of power, narrative and sensory criminology, and the philosophy of science. His most recent book is concerned with forensic psychologists employed within the prisons of England and Wales: Forensic Psychologists: Prisons, Power, and Vulnerability.