This book explores the use of handmade crafts as a vehicle for protest. Craftivism has experienced a resurgence in recent years, often in direct response to the social, environment and political concerns of those who engage in the practice. Acts of craftivism raise important questions for criminologists about the use of public space, power, and resistance. McGovern focuses on an example of the 'craftivist' movement that has been steadily gaining momentum since the early to mid-2000s: yarn bombing. As an urban craft movement that melds the skills of knitting or crochet with the act of graffiti, yarn bombing has the potential to contribute to criminological understandings of graffiti and street art, particularly on issues of gender, perceptions of and motivations for graffiti, and the commodification of crime. Drawing on interviews with yarn bombers and craftivists, Craftivism and Yarn Bombing explores how such acts can be understood and explored through a criminological lens, and will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including criminology, sociology, cultural studies, gender studies, and urban studies.

This book examines the relationship between police, media and the public and analyses the shifting techniques and technologies through which they communicate. In a critical discussion of contemporary and emerging modes of mediatized police work, Lee and McGovern demonstrate how the police engage with the public through a fluid and quickly expanding assemblage of communications and information technologies. Policing and Media explores the rationalities that are driving police/media relations and asks; how these relationships differ (or not) from the ways they have operated historically; what new technologies are influencing and being deployed by policing organizations and police public relations professionals and why; how operational policing is shaping and being shaped by new technologies of communication; and what forms of resistance are evident to the manufacture of preferred images of police. The authors suggest that new forms of simulated and hyper real policing using platforms such as social media and reality television are increasingly positioning police organisations as media organisations, and in some cases enabling police to bypass the traditional media altogether. The book is informed by empirical research spanning ten years in this field and includes chapters on journalism and police, policing and social media, policing and reality television, and policing resistances. It will be of interest to those researching and teaching in the fields of Criminology, Policing and Media, as well as police and media professionals.

This book examines the relationship between police, media and the public and analyses the shifting techniques and technologies through which they communicate. In a critical discussion of contemporary and emerging modes of mediatized police work, Lee and McGovern demonstrate how the police engage with the public through a fluid and quickly expanding assemblage of communications and information technologies. Policing and Media explores the rationalities that are driving police/media relations and asks; how these relationships differ (or not) from the ways they have operated historically; what new technologies are influencing and being deployed by policing organizations and police public relations professionals and why; how operational policing is shaping and being shaped by new technologies of communication; and what forms of resistance are evident to the manufacture of preferred images of police. The authors suggest that new forms of simulated and hyper real policing using platforms such as social media and reality television are increasingly positioning police organisations as media organisations, and in some cases enabling police to bypass the traditional media altogether. The book is informed by empirical research spanning ten years in this field and includes chapters on journalism and police, policing and social media, policing and reality television, and policing resistances. It will be of interest to those researching and teaching in the fields of Criminology, Policing and Media, as well as police and media professionals.