This April Newsletter brings you two articles by us, Ida and Per. In our articles we intend to focus on both science and criminal justice’s inclination of producing the “other”.

Per’s article focus on the interrelationship between the birth of a science on crime and the criminal and the gothic imagination of the nineteenth century.

Although the focus here is on criminology and texts by Cesare Lombroso – other texts could also be considered in this context. For example, among the most famous sentences from the literature of the left is Marx and Engels opening sentence in The Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting Europe“. According to them this was “the specter of Communism” and “All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter“. Later they would draw on the figure of the vampire – that would become even more of an iconic character and debated figure of modern society. Although monsters had been part of science before Marx, Engels and Lombroso’s time, this century created a legacy of othering that we are still grappling with.

Ida, in her article, is looking into some consequences of this long tradition of creating monsters, by addressing how a construction of the criminal “other” takes place through the populist narrative of parallel society, with the effect of criminalizing whole communities and their everyday life.

You can download the Newsletter here.