Concerning Cars: Automobility and the Contours of Control, Order, and Harm

Criminology has been coincident with the motor age, at least in the Global North. The history of automobility is bound up—in mutually conditioning ways—with changing patterns of crime and social control. Yet the car has remained in relative obscurity as a focus of criminological attention—often present, sometimes investigated as a niche topic but at the same time somehow absent. Against this backdrop, this review describes some key elements of the close relation between automobility and the changing contours of control, order, and harm and offers some preliminary conceptual resources for identifying and investigating the criminological resonances of that most pervasive and mundane of modern objects: the automobile. By treating auto-dominance as a form of slow violence, we can, I argue, make the car into a vehicle for rethinking how to practice criminology in a time of climate breakdown.