Rural Criminology and Criminological Knowledge: From Space and Place to the Global Scale

Abstract

Rural criminology is a more recent development in the criminological enterprise with burgeoning interest in research and scholarship in recent years. More pertinently, as urban lenses have been primarily used to generalise within mainstream criminology, the current upsurge in rural criminology sets off a major epistemological project to counter the urban-normativity of contemporary knowledge. But would this quest be entirely inductive or might it involve utilising more eclectic theoretical toolkits? Rural criminology relies heavily upon local context where space and place are critical, but vital too are the continuities and links with urban society. Such analyses are not immune from mainstream theories, such as those about the nature of modernity, globalization and glocalization. Zooming in to local context to explore global impacts on place and space is vital. Zooming out to the global scale is also critical as wider lenses are needed for capturing major cultural, historical and geographic influences that shape rurality itself, such as patriarchy, technology and colonization for example. Two questions are asked in this article: (i) Can theories on space and place developed for urbanised modernity be applied to rural contexts and help to build theory from rural studies; (ii) can recent analysis of the breadth of rural criminology globally, give us some direction from a top-down, macroscopic level? This article utilises learning from the case of rural safety security in Ireland and the conclusions from a recent volume exploring rural criminology in global perspective.

Keywords: space, place, rural criminology, global scale, modernity

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