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Based on fieldwork among Muslim drug dealers in Norway, this chapter presents a narrative ethnographic framework for the study of storytelling. Whereas traditional narrative research considers stories mainly for their internal structure and meaning, narrative ethnography widens the focus to examine stories as they are being performed on specific social occasions. This widened focus requires sustained ethnographic attention to an array of situational factors, most notably the cultural context from which narratives emerge; the locations in which narratives are performed or not performed; the expressive means used during narrative performances; the sequence of actions that make up the scenario of performances; and the impact performances have on the narrators and their audiences. One of the advantages of narrative ethnography is that it allows for consideration of storytelling practices as they evolve and change across time and space. Another is that it facilitates embodied engagement and understandings of other people's situation. The chapter suggests that narrative criminologists may benefit from studying storytelling with all of their senses – not just hearing or reading words, but actively sensing narrative performances with their entire bodies. By mobilizing all senses, and attending to both verbal and nonverbal stimuli, the narrative researcher may develop an embodied ‘feel’ for the stories people are telling.

This chapter demonstrates the value of ethnographic research to the study of the relationship between legal narrative and professional identity. It focuses on the ethical and professional judgements embedded in American federal prosecutors' creation and critiques of opening and closing statements. Drawing on ethnographic research, I argue that these statements revolve around the concept of ‘justice’, which prosecutors articulate, affirm and contest through the narratives of honesty and impartiality. More broadly, these conceptions of justice inform how federal prosecutors understand their identities and roles as professional legal actors. Ethnography's unique value lies in furnishing data pertaining to how trial narratives are fashioned and refined through ‘workshopping’ before these narratives are shared with jurors. The chapter thus highlights processes of narrative reflexivity and story composition.

This chapter makes a case for a decolonial, intersectional approach to narrative criminology. It argues that in growing contexts of deepening inequalities, research approaches that humanise people on the margins and that explicitly centre questions of social justice are ever more urgent. This chapter explicates a decolonial, intersectional narrative analysis, working with the data generated in interviews with women sex workers on their experiences of violence outlining how a decolonial, intersectional, narrative analysis may be accomplished to analyse the intersections of power at material, representational and structural levels. The chapter illustrates the importance of an intersectional feminist lens for amplifying the complexity of women sex workers' experiences of gendered violence and for understanding the multiple forms of material, symbolic and institutionalised subordination they experience in increasingly unequal and oppressive contexts. It ends by considering the contributions decolonial, intersectional feminist work can offer narrative criminology, especially the emerging field of narrative victimology.

This chapter examines representations of gender in online modafinil markets. While gender has often been absent from scholarship on online drug markets, our analysis demonstrates the ubiquity of gender in representations of modafinil users and sellers. The analysis draws on visual images, blogs, and marketing emails relating to three websites selling modafinil, discussed pseudonymously. We describe the range of ways that notions of gender are represented in advertising. Although women represent around 40% of that buying modafinil online, websites and communications tended not to feature women. Although sexist stereotypes of women were rarely present (in contrast to direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising), the ways that modafinil was imagined tended to focus narrowly on corporate spheres of work and productivity. We contrast this narrow imaginary with female journalists’ own accounts of using modafinil to manage illness and enhance creativity. Thus, we conclude that the ways that modafinil has been imagined reflects working assumptions as to who is considered the ‘normal’ participant in online modafinil markets.

In recent years, two new approaches have bloomed in criminological thinking, narrative criminology and psychosocial criminology. Both have argued for a new consideration of offenders' narratives, which are investigated as a description of life events and choices, and of the decision to offend. An interview regarding the life and deviant career of an Italian football hooligan (‘ultras’) – a Bangladeshi–Italian boy trying to find his place in Italian society – will show how the two approaches can be combined in an analysis of the subject's often ambiguous narratives, in which both neutralisation techniques and defence mechanisms can be discerned. We will first describe the complex narrative strategies used. We will then try to explain how, through the use of complex defences and neutralisations, the subject can feel simultaneously integrated into both the deviant group and general society. In this case, despite antinomies and ambiguity, integration is achieved by keeping at bay the sense of guilt related to aggression towards parental figures.

Following recent terrorist attacks in the US and Europe, Western Muslims have been criticised for not taking a firm stand against radical Islam and extremist organisations. Drawing on insights from narrative criminology, we challenge such assertions and reveal Muslims' narrative mobilisation against violent jihadism. Based on 90 qualitative interviews with young Muslims in Norway, we show how violent extremism is rejected in a multitude of ways. This narrative resistance includes criticising extremist jihadist organisations for false interpretations of Islam and using derogatory terms to describe them. It also includes less obvious forms of narrative resistance, such as humour and attempts to silence jihadist organisations by ignoring them. While narrative criminology has effectively analysed the stories that constitute harm, less attention has been paid to narratives that counter harm. We argue that stories that counter jihadi narratives are crucial to understand the narrative struggles of Muslim communities, whose outcomes can help determine why some individuals end up becoming religious extremists – while others do not. By distinguishing between factual, emotional and humorous counternarratives and describing silence as a form of resistance, we show resistance to extremism that is often concealed from the public and the state.

Narrative criminology has made stories respectable again, despite criminology's long-professed ties to a model of positive science. Given the field's continued scepticism about the ‘truthfulness’ of stories, narrative scholars have grappled carefully with the place and utility of lies for understanding the social worlds and individual identities of crime-involved populations. In this chapter, we draw from a study of women's pathways to incarceration in Sri Lanka, analysing the case of one study participant who shared with us many ‘tall tales’ about their life. In comparing Daya's account with those of other participants, we explore the complex relations among ‘truth,’ ‘fiction’ and ‘lies,’ and their implications for narrative criminology. We offer specific cautions about the place of verisimilitude and plausibility in narrative criminologists' efforts to make sense of offender narratives.

The potential for a ‘narrative turn’ in victimology carries with it all kinds of possibilities and problems in adding nuanced understandings smoothed out and sometimes erased from the vision of victimhood provided by criminal victimisation data. In this chapter, we explore the methodological and theoretical questions posed by such a narrative turn by presenting the case of June: a mother bereaved by gun violence that unfolded in Manchester two decades ago. Excavated using in-depth biographical interviewing, June told the story of the loss of her son, the role of faith in dealing with the aftermath of violence and eventually, how this story became a source for change for the community in which it was read and heard. June's story provided an impetus for establishing a grassroots antiviolence organisation and continued to be the driver for that same group long after the issue it was formed to address had become less problematic. As a story it served different purposes for the individual concerned, for the group they were a part of and for the wider community in which the group emerged. However, this particular story also raises questions for victimology in its understanding of the role of voice in policy and concerning the nature of evidence for both policy and the discipline itself. This chapter considers what lessons narrative victimology might learn from narrative criminology, the overlaps that the stories of victims and offenders might share and what the implications these might have for understanding what it means to be harmed.