Imaginative criminology explores the spaces and places of transgression as lived, portrayed and imagined. These include spaces of control or confinement (homes for Indigenous children, Magdalene laundries, prisons and refugee camps), borders that constitute marginalised and liminal places and spaces that are betwixt and between (peace walls and border lines), as well as fictional dystopias. It pays attention to how these spaces are experienced, understood, imagined and remembered as sites of transgression, exclusion, resistance and possibility. In our previous book, we examined historical and contemporary ‘transgressive imaginations’ and resistances in relation to the ‘outsider’ the ‘criminal’ and the ‘deviant’ through the genres of art, film, literature and ethnographic research (O’Neill and Seal, 2012). Here, we extend our analysis to grapple with the significance of transgression as it is imagined and lived in space.

Imaginative ‘criminologies’ is perhaps more apposite than imaginative criminology. The term is not intended to connote a particular perspective (indeed, this would undermine imagination) or a new type of criminology. Rather, it refers to work with certain characteristics. One of these is an ‘increasing focus on cultural artefacts and institutions’ (Frauley, 2015a: 618) and what Jacobsen (2014) refers to as the poetic dimensions of criminology. Imaginative criminologists borrow ‘insights from artistic or literary sources’ (p 2) and from their associated academic disciplines (O’Neill and Seal, 2012). Such work is flourishing and here we intend to make a further contribution to its expansion.

While criminology is frequently understood as the study of crime and criminal justice, and its methods as those of conventional social science, such as surveys and interviews, it is not contained or constrained by these definitions. For example, Young (2011: 13) in The Criminological Imagination critiques mainstream criminology's lack of imagination, evidenced by an almost singular focus on positivism, ‘quasi-scientific rhetoric’ and administrative criminology that works in favour of or legitimates neoliberal politics and offers cultural criminology as an antidote. This is a cultural criminology constituted through ethnographic work and phenomenological approaches.

Carlen (2010) in her book A Criminological Imagination, a selection of her work (over 30 years), delivers a deconstructionist, reflexive and critical analysis on punishment, prison and penal reform that invites readers to imagine a better world, serving the interests of justice and where ‘the ordering of things can always be otherwise’.