Cultural criminology is a specific subfield within the broader discipline of criminology. It embodies an alternative, often critical, approach to conventional criminological thought. The distinctive nature of cultural criminology is embedded in its methodological approaches and thematic content. Methodologically, it tends to rely on ethnography, fieldwork, and qualitative methods rather than “positivistic” and abstract quantitative techniques. Thematically speaking, cultural criminology often refuses to take crime, deviance, and punishment for granted. Instead, the focus shifts to the broader social and cultural contexts of crime/deviance, the meaning that crime has for participants, how power shapes the nature of rules and their enforcement, how media shapes criminal justice policies, and, amongst other things, the complicated relationship between popular discourse, crime, deviance, and social control. In this course students will become familiar with these issues and themes, thereby developing a general understanding of cultural criminology as a field of inquiry.