Seminar 1 - Crime and criminal justice in film and video games

Semester 1 - The media: Crime and criminal justice

In Semester 1 this academic year, we are exploring the theme of the media in the CCR seminars. The rise of law-and-order politics in the post-war period has contributed to a complex relationship between the media, crime and the criminal justice institutions tasked with responding to it. The more recent digital revolution has added further layers of complexity, transforming how crime and criminal justice are represented, discussed and contested. This semester, we therefore examine the relationship between media, crime and criminal justice, with a particular focus on film, video games and social media.

Seminar 1 - ‘Crime and criminal justice in film and video games’, co-hosted with the Sheffield Centre for Research in Film (SCRIF)

Date and time: 2.30-4.30pm, 4 November 2026

Venue: Moot Court, School of Law and Online（Join with Google Meet）

• Prof. Jonathan Rayner (University of Sheffield, Co-Director of SCRIF) - Crime on Film: Convention-Entertainment-Realism

• Professor Rowland Atkinson (University of Sheffield) - ‘Pleasure Zones and 'Murder Boxes': Online Pornography and Violent Video-Games as Cultural Zones of Exception’

• Crime on Film: Convention-Entertainment-Realism

Professor Jonathan Rayner, Co-Director of SCRIF and School of English, University of Sheffield

Abstract: This paper will explore the history, development and interpretation of the American gangster film from its origins in the 1930s to the 2000s.This context will provide the framework for considering the representation of crime in the films of Michael Mann. As a mainstream Hollywood writer-director and producer with additional extensive tv credits, Mann and his work constitute a case study of the evolution and consistency in representations of law and order, and the practice, perpetration and consequences of crime. Mann has created a wide range of popular cultural content, from tv movies, television franchises, miniseries and feature films which examine the personal, moral, cultural and sociological impacts of law breaking, law enforcement and imprisonment. While his output is distinctive and instantly recognisable stylistically and thematically, it both draws on extensive research and observation of signature American cities and their criminal cultures, and offers insight to the evolving form of crime stories across film and television in other countries.

Jonathan Rayner is Professor of Film Studies at University Sheffield, School of English. He is co-director of SCRIF (the Sheffield Centre for Research in Film) and author of The Films of Michael Mann: Vice and Vindication (Wallflower Press, 2013)

• Pleasure Zones and 'Murder Boxes': Online Pornography and Violent Video-Games as Cultural Zones of Exception

Professor Rowland Atkinson, School of Geography and Planning, University of Sheffield

Abstract: New media formats and technologies raise questions about new-found abilities to indulge apparently limitless violent and sadistic curiosity within our culture. In this context the mainstreaming of sex and violence via mobile and screen media systems opens important questions about the degree to which these influences are harmful or indicative of deeper social problems. Analysis of the consequences of these new media zones, acknowledging their allure, excitement and everyday cultural position, offered. In particular I want to focus on a distinctive hallmark of much online pornography and massively popular violent videogames - the offer of unchecked encounters with images ('real' and increasingly synthesised) of others who can be subordinated to violent and sexual desire. A key implication of these zones of cultural exception, in which social rules can be more or less abandoned, is their role in further assisting denials of harm from the perspective of hyper-masculinist and militaristic social value systems. A bleak social prognosis is offered in conclusion.

Rowland Atkinson is Chair in Inclusive Societies at the University of Sheffield. His work focuses on the spatial consequences of social divisions and inequalities. This has included work on household displacement from gentrification, gated communities, and the impact of wealth and the wealthy on urban life. His work combines criminological theory, urban sociology and human geographical approaches to social harm. He is the author of (with Gareth Millington) Urban Criminology: The City, Disorder, Harm and Social Control and editor of Shades of Deviance (with Tammy Ayres).