A leap of faith into the common byways. Performing arts as a tool for ‘sensory’, ‘affective’ and ‘performative’ criminology to explore the symbolic and emotional worlds of violent crime

Researchers delving into the socio-criminological field and attentively exploring the most innovative methodologies acknowledge that, in conjunction with research methods relying on oral and writ- ten language, a new range of non-textual strategies has emerged as an alternative mode of knowledge acquisition. This essay proposes an exploratory approach to gather the practices of theatre and criminology together in investigating and understanding violent crime and criminals through performing arts with a sensory methodology that takes imaginative and bodily encounters as a crucial part of knowledge pro- duction. The intention is to try to establish a medium where criminologists and theatre artists mutually contribute to a platform to scrutinize crime through their ‘arts’. In this work, we suggest that exploring, experiencing and staging the phenomena of crime with the actor’s body and their art as a channel can inspire and add layers to criminology studies and teaching.