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Criminal Life-Course Trajectories Globally

Project description

Mapping how social context and storytelling shape criminal lives

Why do some people drift into crime while others do not? How do social settings shape these paths? Traditional criminology has focused largely on wealthy countries, leaving much of the world unexplored. The ERC-funded CRIMLIFE project aims to change this by tracing criminal lives across six countries on four continents: Norway, India, Colombia, the Czechia, Nigeria, Norway, and Türkiye. The project will study life histories, personal narratives, and comparative data. Its goal is to explain how social conditions, institutions, and gender influence both criminal trajectories and the stories people tell about them. CRIMLIFE aims to establish a truly global, life-course perspective on crime.

Objective

How do social contexts determine paths into crime? How do these trajectories vary across different societal circumstances? And how are they narrated? CRIMEGLO is the first-ever large-scale comparative life-course criminological study globally. No research hitherto has addressed criminal careers and storytelling in such detail and on the scale envisaged in this project. The approach will counterweight the current Northern bias in research and theory, a shift necessary to establish a truly global perspective within life-course criminology.

Cultural and societal contexts play a large role in defining and responding to crime. Social conditions shape the life-courses of those getting caught up in the criminal justice system. Context is also intertwined with the ways people talk about their lives. CRIMEGLO will explore and compare crime from a life-course and life-story perspective spanning four continents and six countries: Norway, the Czech Republic, Türkiye, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Colombia.

By combining criminological theory with institutional, cultural, and narrative studies, CRIMEGLO’s goal is to establish global comparative research on crime within a life-course perspective. The primary objective is to introduce and theoretically develop a contextually sensitive, comparative global life-course criminology. The secondary objective is to achieve a better empirical understanding of the particular social, economic, institutional, and gendered factors shaping criminal life-courses in different countries with highly divergent societal contexts.

Principal Investigator Sveinung Sandberg is a sociologist and one of Europe’s leading qualitative criminologists. He has pioneered the prominent research traditions of Bourdieusian Criminology and Narrative Criminology. With CRIMEGLO, he expands globally his qualitative work on life-courses and life-stories started in Latin America and, for the first time, incorporates quantitative and comparative methods to his research.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG

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Host institution

UNIVERSITETET I OSLO
Net EU contribution
€ 2 099 017,50
Address
PROBLEMVEIEN 5-7
0313 Oslo
Norway
Region
Norge Oslo og Viken Oslo
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data

Beneficiaries (6)