February 2020 marks the one-year anniversary of the publication of the edited collection on Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives by Dr. Dimitris Akrivos and Dr. Alexandros Antoniou (Lecturers in Law at the University of Essex).

The book explores the links between crime, deviance and popular culture in our highly-mediatised era, offering an insight into the cultural processes through which particular practices acquire a criminal or deviant status, and come to be seen as social problems.

Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture brings together European, American and Australian scholars with various specialisms to provide an up-to-date analysis of some topical issues in 21st-century popular culture. Its chapters look at different aspects of popular culture, including fictional portrayals of the law and criminal justice system, the true crime genre, popular media constructions of sexual deviance and Islamophobia, sports, graffiti and outlaw biker subcultures.

The collection, which was among the top 25% most downloaded eBooks in Palgrave’s Crime, Media and Culture series in 2019, has been praised by reviewers for its ‘admirably broad’ scope (see Ashley Pearson, Ksenia Gałuskina and Thomas Giddens (2019) 32(2) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 523).

By producing new empirical data through a wide range of case studies, it makes an original contribution to several disciplines, including criminology, sociology of deviance, social anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, television studies and linguistics.