Lecture Notes on Structure, Agency, Crime Fiction, and Media

Quiz Information

• The quiz will have five minutes of reading time and twenty minutes to complete, totaling twenty-five minutes.
• Short answers should be concise (two to three sentences).
• Instructions will be provided in the quiz.
• Online students can email questions during the quiz, but responses may be delayed.
• The quiz is a mandatory assessment.
• It can be taken from any location with WiFi or mobile internet.
• Students with AAP (special program) benefits must attach the approved file in their email to receive extra reading time.
• Starting the quiz late is permitted, but it must be started by 2:40 PM.
• Legitimate excuses for missing the quiz should be emailed for alternative arrangements.
• Preparation for the quiz should include reviewing lectures, slides, notes, and required readings (three lectures and three tutorial readings).

Agency and Structure

• Humans have agency, which is the ability to make conscious, willful decisions.
• Agency involves having free will and being able to recognize circumstances and make choices.
• Agents can make wrong choices and experience regret.
• Capabilities to exercise agency are not equal among all agents.
• Examples:
  • A lecturer's agency is constrained by the university's curriculum.
  • People with disabilities or those in prison have limited agency.
  • Individuals with addictions have constrained choices.
• Society can increase agency capabilities through empowerment, skills, and additional resources like cognitive behavior therapy.
• Capabilities are not fixed and can be increased or decreased.
• Conflation Theory (Archer): Middle ground between structure and agency.
  • Central Conflation: Mutual constitution; interdependence of structure and agency.
  • Upward Inflation: Primacy to agency; agency can change or resist structures.
  • Downward Inflation: Structure dominates agency.
• Structural and cultural properties (e.g., institutions, inequality) have potential causal powers but are only important when relevant to human projects.
• Human projects are intentional courses of action to achieve specific ends.
  • Examples include prisoners wanting to desist from crime or restore relations with their children.
  • Other human projects include completing a degree or improving relationships.
• Structural factors act as enablements or constraints depending on their relevance to human projects.
  • Supportive family environment aids in overcoming addiction, while a drug-using subculture hinders it.
• Agency works in anticipation of enablement or constraints and people evaluate structural factors to make decisions.

Exercising Agency

• Ability to exercise agency depends on self-control, self-regulation, knowledge, and self-awareness.
• Agentic orientation and self-assurance (hope and confidence) play a significant role.
• Hopefulness, even when unrealistic, can help individuals survive difficult situations such as incarceration.
• Structural factors condition individuals through social contexts, norms, institutions, and cultural values.
• Personal reflexivity helps individuals engage with and respond to their social environments.
• Archer rejects the idea of hydraulic pressures, noting that individuals navigate structural constraints and give meaning to them.

Agency and Structure Summary

• Agency captures how people reflect on their condition and act in situations.
• Structure and agency cohere and are constitutive (central conflation theories).
• Structures, external factors, shape behavior and provide or withdraw resources.
• Agents give meaning and can reproduce, question, resist, and shape structures.
• Structure is pre-existing and outside of our control, shaping behavior, traits, and beliefs.
• Agency is the ability to act independently of structures, engage with them, resist them, and shape them.
• Key Questions:
  • To what extent are people's actions constrained by social structure?
  • To what extent do people have the capacity to exercise free will?
• Practical implications: Responsibility and blame attribution depend on the emphasis given to agency or structure.
• Political implications: Should we change institutions or humans to improve society?
• Structures can simultaneously enable and constrain, and comprise both the means and outcomes of actions.
• Subjective experiences and structural constraints should be considered in social phenomenon analysis.
• Affirmation involves discussing problems and creating relations for calm discussion instead of polarization.
• Radical change and transformation require collective assemblages to redefine capabilities.
• Self-assurance and hope are central to human action and exercising agency.

Crime Fiction and Media

• Media can distort facts for clickbait and monetization.
• Fiction can provide intimate perspectives on social phenomena.
• Crime fiction can give a personalized view of things rather than necessarily structuralist.
• Crime fiction reinforces the need to restore order and for good to prevail.
• Crime fiction overrepresents blue-collar crime and ignores white-collar crime.
• Crime fiction might romanticize or justify deviance.
• Crime fiction offers imaginative revenge and restoration of justice.
• Crime fiction can spark moral panics.
• Crime fiction might lead to an increased amount of sympathy towards a figure or character.

Crime Fiction and Criminology

• Crime fiction, like criminology, relies on resonance between author and audience.
• Both offer explanations for behaviors and situations.
• Fiction can give awareness or reinforce prejudices.
• Sociology and criminology provide understanding (Verstehen) how to understand certain behaviors or situations.
• Fiction can reduce complexities and give voice to others.
• Crime fiction can boost cliches, misrepresentations, and power dynamics.

Examples of Misrepresentations in Crime Fiction

• Police are typically represented as forces of good, while the reality is less clear cut.
• Police dramas can undermine the reality of inefficiency and limits of science.
• Crime dramas can perpetuate idealized, unrealistic versions of jobs, relationships, and police behavior.

Crime Stories and Solutions

• Historically, crime stories reveal how crime and justice were treated and perceived in different contexts.
• Anonymity in neoliberal societies is reflected in preoccupations with lonely anonymous killers, such as serial killers.
• Fiction can reveal inner truth, mirror social structures, and reflect social beliefs and prejudices.

Social Order and Crime Fiction

• Dickens' Little Dorrit critiques debtors' prisons, bureaucracy, and the class system.
• Crime fiction represents changing gender roles.
• Representation or misrepresentation of disability in fiction can perpetuate prejudices or challenge societal norms.

Ideal Victim

• An ideal victim is typically seen as innocent, vulnerable, and deserving of sympathy.
  • Example: Older white women are widely accepted to be good victims.
  • Animal victims are typically viewed as good victims, though this may be dependent on the animal's perceived innocence.
• Media often reflects and reinforces social prejudices through crime fiction.

Intersection of Media and Crime

• Media sets the agenda for how we think about crime.
• It often fixates on street-level crimes while ignoring harmful actions of others.
• Media identifies crises and places too much responsibility on individual culpability.
• They often propagate commonsensical, ineffective interventions.
• Media coverage can lead to vigilante violence and discriminatory policies.

Summary of Key Points

• Crime fiction focuses on agency and individual responsibility.
• Crime fiction reveals social mores and normative frameworks.
• Crime fiction highlights deviance and potential restoration of order.
• Media helps sociology and criminology in decoding and understanding the world.
• Media are influential in determining which crimes are focused on, but not necessarily in effecting policy.