Edited by Mareile KaufmannHeidi Mork Lomell

The De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Criminology examines how digital devices spread and cut across all fields of crime and control. Providing a glossary of key theoretical, methodological and criminological concepts, the book defines and further establishes a vibrant, rapidly developing field. Focusing on central criminological phenomena, it provides a framework that will enable readers to bring their own research themes into digital environments.

UBerlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2025. 525p.

By Zimmer, Catherine

In Paris, a static video camera keeps watch on a bourgeois home. In Portland, a webcam documents the torture and murder of kidnap victims. And in clandestine intelligence offices around the world, satellite technologies relentlessly pursue the targets of global conspiracies. Such plots represent only a fraction of the surveillance narratives that have become commonplace in recent cinema. Catherine Zimmer examines how technology and ideology have come together in cinematic form to play a functional role in the politics of surveillance. Drawing on the growing field of surveillance studies and the politics of contemporary monitoring practices, she demonstrates that screen narrative has served to organize political, racial, affective, and even material formations around and through surveillance. She considers how popular culture forms are intertwined with the current political landscape in which the imagery of anxiety, suspicion, war, and torture has become part of daily life. From Enemy of the State and The Bourne Series to Saw, Caché, and Zero Dark Thirty, Surveillance Cinema explores in detail the narrative tropes and stylistic practices that characterize contemporary films and television series about surveillance.

New York: NYU Press,  2015. 288p

By Tersia Oosthuizen, Loene M. Howes, Rob White

Items of litter such as chewing gum, cigarette butts, and dog droppings are each small but collectively have considerable negative environmental impacts. Accordingly, governments at all levels have used media campaigns to raise awareness of the environmental issues associated with litter in efforts to prevent its proliferation. In a similar vein, artists have developed thought-provoking works about waste and litter, including some about the potential to identify litter culprits through DNA analysis. In a case of life imitating art, recent advances in DNA analysis techniques make possible a range of ways in which DNA taken from litter could be used, including for purposes of social regulation. This article discusses examples of the use of litter as a source of DNA for analysis and the resulting genetic surveillance. In doing so, it raises questions about proportionality and justifications for such uses of DNA analysis techniques in regard to regulation and enforcement objectives, with particular concerns about permissions, privacy and the public interest.

Forensic Science International: Animals and Environments. Volume 2, December 2022