Brazilian Cultural Criminology

This book identifies an emerging Brazilian cultural criminology which combines Brazilian and Latin American critical criminology with the new avenues of investigation and methodologies that characterize cultural criminology more broadly. Bringing together various perspectives, it offers a new take on cultural criminology which demonstrates its international scope and innovative approaches to explore the specific problems of Brazil’s peripheral reality. It offers a window into past and present Brazil, discussing themes of colonialism, slavery, genocide, eugenics, police lethality, mass imprisonment, urban groups, Bolsonarism, youth gangs, mediated representation, and the pandemic.

The joint work of criminologists from Brazil constitutes a new facet of Brazilian critical criminology and a new facet of cultural criminology itself. Bound by their common political identity, these fields continue to develop and spiral together, challenging accepted notions of locality and reinventing academic and everyday forms of resistance in different arenas of the Global South and Global North.

This book demonstrates that the reception and incorporation of methodologies and ideas from cultural criminology into Brazilian critical criminology do not reveal a simple reproduction, but rather that Brazilian criminologists continue to reinvent and contest, from the margins, the very cultural criminology of the Global North from which they were inspired to refine and expand the accumulated critical knowledge positioned against administrative criminology.

The translation of this book was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done for language and content.