About the project

Walking through the city, engaging with spaces and places associated with crime and justice is a way of seeing and feeling the history of crime, justice and punishment in the present. The York Crime Walk will develop ways to get in touch with the history, buildings and places in sensory and corporeal ways. Walking is a very helpful method to conduct a critical recovery of the histories and cultures of crime, justice and punishment in the present in York

There is a long and varied tradition of walking in both ethnographic and anthropological research, but not in the discipline of criminology. Building upon earlier work that combines walking as a method alongside participatory, creative, biographical and visual research to generate knowledge and understanding, we suggest that developing a crime and justice walk in York can be a way of both knowing and understanding the history of crime, criminal justice, and punishment in city spaces - which will be of interest to students, CrimNet members as well as the general public.

Project origins

The idea and development of the walk emerged from conversations led by Maggie O'Neill, Harriet Crowder and David Honeywell at the event CrimNet Conversations hosed by CrimNet and organised by Matt Coward; a walk Maggie had taken with David for her Leverhulme fellowship; a walk she created with Dr Ivan Hill in Durham and conversations with Ruth Penfold-Mounce, Rachel Morris, Sharon Grace, Lisa O'Malley, Nathan Manning and Gernot Klantschnig at a BA Criminology Board of Studies. 

There was great interest and energy around producing a crime and justice walk in order to support the Criminology programmes at the University of York, as an output of CrimNet collaborations, to share research expertise and as a collaborative, outward facing output that could be shared with the widest possible audiences. A bid was submitted to the Department of Sociology and Harriet Crowder was successfully appointed to a funded summer internship. 

This walk was developed collaboratively underpinned by the principles of participatory research and visual, mobile and preformative methods. The Crime Walk team seeks to connect the walk to curriculum development in criminology by using the crime walk as a teaching tool in a first year module - the sociology of crime and deviance - as well as on university open days and by the University of York criminology society as well as making it available to the wider public.

We hope you enjoy watching this site develop as much as we have enjoyed developing the project.