Abstract
In this chapter, I suggest that visual research in green criminology may help (1) in exploring the silent knowledge of social actors of different social, cultural and ecological contexts; and (2) in bridging cultural and natural worlds, thereby crossing the dichotomous divide between what is natural and what is social. During this journey towards knowledge and understanding, it is essential to develop not only flexible methods, but also elastic conceptual tools—instruments sensitive enough to capture the vagueness and elusiveness of environmental issues without severely diminishing their multiple dimensions. Taking into account visual dimensions and using photographs as tools of qualitative research represent a precious means of addressing new ways of looking at, seeing and sensing these complex questions, promoting thoughts not yet formulated, new questions and answers.
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Notes
- 1.
See Chap. 6.
- 2.
McIntyre (2008: XII, emphasis in original) writes: “Participatory action research does provide opportunities for codeveloping processes with people rather than for people. Its emphasis on people’s lived experiences, individual and social change, the coconstruction of knowledge […] has the potential to create public spaces where researchers and participants can reshape their understanding of how political, educational, social, economic, and familiar contexts mediate people’s lives.” In the context of PAR, McIntyre (2008) uses the technique of “photo-voice.” Photo-voice is a visual method of PAR conceived by Caroline Wang (2006) in the 1990s and is characterized by the following aspects: the prevalent aim is social change, in the footsteps of Kurt Lewin’s Action Research; the participants are asked to take photographs of themes relevant to their daily life which, according to them, must take into consideration a perspective of social change; there is the intention of making the voices of the participants in the research heard in the political sphere in order to orientate policy decisions and to improve practices.
- 3.
See Chap. 6.
- 4.
See also Chap. 6.
- 5.
- 6.
See Chap. 4.
- 7.
From a green criminological perspective, the very polyhedric nature of the concept of crime suggests that it cannot be reduced to the legal definition, which says little about the gravity that the behaviours under consideration can in reality assume. To this is added another level of complexity given by the fact that the expression “environmental crime” includes meanings presenting a certain amount of ambiguity and vagueness of definition. Hence, the importance of probing the intricate tangle of the social and natural worlds called into question by the empirical dimension of the phenomenon (see Forti 2000).
- 8.
It is necessary to consider environmental crimes and harms as violations of human rights “through the eyes of those who are fighting to make them effective and to know them in order to claim them, daily” (Frisina 2013: 194, emphasis in original).
- 9.
The temporal perspective has proved decisive in two ways: as a temporal perspective in the long term and as vision of the present. As I have suggested elsewhere (Natali 2013b, 2015a), it is not enough to observe and analyse new phenomena with pre-existing approaches; it is always necessary to re-consider them with new eyes, to re-describe them from a new viewpoint, in tune with reality and with the “tempos” of the social (and natural) worlds in which we live.
- 10.
Again Calvino (1988: 124) brings imagination to a new, estreme level: “Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in the spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic.”
- 11.
Following on the long wave of the teachings of eminent scholars (Latour 1993 [1991]; Beck 2009 [2007]), we have by now learned that scientific knowledge is also conditioned by “mistakes” and social practices; often, it cannot manage to keep at bay this hybridization of knowledge, constitutively uncertain. What I have tried to do is to give value and radicalize the questions that ordinary people ask themselves in the context of an environmental crime, not to simplify them but to find their meaning, a meaning that might illuminate other places.
- 12.
See Chap. 6.
- 13.
On the relation between photographic images and “truth,” Harper (2012: 110) writes: “it is true that we can use photos to learn about the world; to compare times, views, places and to look for sociological inferences from what we see. This is one side of the coin, but the other is that it is important to remember that even the most indexical photos have a simultaneously subjective character created by point of view, lens and other camera features. Like all truth claims they are situated and partial.”
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
Ethical values are continually changing, sometimes clearly, sometimes less obviously. This is why “[…] we must be attentive and sensitive to the changed perspectives they take on, which impose on us a continuous vigilance” (Bencivenga 2015: 129).
- 17.
- 18.
At the moment, I am exploring a technique that is partly inspired by the visual explorations of the anthropologist Andrew Irving (2011) and intends to help to decipher “how spaces become places” (Nuvolati 2011: 14; see also Brisman and South 2014) in the concrete complexity of the dynamic relationship between social actor and lived environment. Those participating in the research are asked to take the researcher to a place that deals with the social perception of environmental crime. Then they are asked to walk around that place and try to express aloud the “stream of consciousness” (thoughts and emotions) that might arise during the walk and to take photographs. The soliloquy of the subject is registered and the route is filmed from a distance. Then the participant is asked to comment on her/his “itinerant soliloquy” ex post.
- 19.
Calvino (1988: 35) writes: “a story is an operation carried out on the length of time involved, an enchantment that acts on the passage of time, either contracting or dilating it.”
- 20.
- 21.
Narrative criminology approaches could prove extremely valuable for understanding these dimensions of environmental crimes (see, e.g., Sandberg and Presser 2015).
- 22.
Because within each of us a crowd of voices, of images and of different characters live together, it is necessary to pay attention and listen to this multiple ambiguity that constitutes us, observing the way in which it answers to the images that are proposed and to the requests they bring. We can ask ourselves: To which interior voice (and to which values) does that certain image appeal and call, “allowing it to prevail upon the internal competition and to speak in our name, till proved otherwise” (Bencivenga 2015: 149)? The intimate tie between the observed image and the answer of our “phantom community” (Athens 1994), in terms of interpretation of the situation and of moral conversation, becomes particularly rich and productive here. See also Chap. 2.
- 23.
See Chap. 5.
- 24.
See Chap. 5.
- 25.
On this aspect, see Rorty (1989).
- 26.
Naturally, it will not be enough to give a voice to those who do not have one. The real challenge will be to ensure that those voices and those looks become audible and visible in the public sphere (Frisina 2013: 171), for example using public, even artistic, events. A protest march, a strike or a flash-mob are social actions that make visible the conflict and the stakes of the play (Brighenti 2010). Moreover, digital media allow the single narratives to become part of a collective project, creating, for example, an archive on the social perception of a specific phenomenon and favouring social practices aimed at seeing differently (Frisina 2013: 159).
- 27.
The image and the story of the invisible elephant is echoed by Giuseppe Mantovani, who recalls that it is taken from Kalidasi’s Sakuntala, one of the best-known dramas of Sanskrit literature: “The meaning we attribute to the story is that the elephant […] is really invisible, unless we know what to look at, whereas it looms like a mountain filling the horizon only if we have an idea of what we must look at” (Mantovani 1998: 10). See also Chap. 1.
- 28.
Many questions remain: What role is played by the indirect imaginary, the one made up of the images provided by culture? What will be the capacity of the individual imagination in the so-called “civilization of the image”? Again Calvino (1988: 91–92):
At one time the visual memory of an individual was limited to the heritage of his direct experiences and to a restricted repertory of images reflected in culture. The possibility of giving form to personal myths arose from the way in which the fragments of this memory came together in unexpected and evocative combinations. We are bombarded today by such a quantity of images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few seconds on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images, like a rubbish dump, and it is more and more unlikely that any one form among so many will succeed in standing out.
These aspects open the door to a new line of comparative methods: “The mind-numbing number of images now available via free Web sources would make it possible to experiment with comparative analysis in a newly creative way. Photos have the disarming capacity to ask what sociological concepts look like in the concrete” (Harper 2012: 107).
- 29.
Becker (1998: 60–61) writes:
Assume that whatever you want to study has, not causes, but a history, a story, a narrative, a ‘first this happened, then that happened, and then the other happened, and it ended up like this’. On this view, we understand the occurrences of events by learning the steps in the process by which they came to happen, rather than by learning the conditions that made their existence necessary. […]. From this point of view, events are not caused by anything other than the story that led them to be the way they are.
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Natali, L. (2016). Conclusion: A Possible Way Out. In: A Visual Approach for Green Criminology. Palgrave Studies in Green Criminology. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54668-5_7
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