Book review: McGuinness P, Simpson A, Fredriksson T, Hauntology: An Introduction for Criminologists McGuinnessPSimpsonAFredrikssonT et al. (2025). Hauntology: An Introduction for Criminologists. Taylor & Francis, ISBN 9781032577401, €50.99

Criminological method is dead.And yet, as Ferrell (2017) reminds us, a rebirth emerges in its afterlife.But how to go about such a postmortem?How to explore these afterlives, to speak with these spectres?Hauntology: An Introduction for Criminologists provides the first concise, approachable, yet critical and provocative guide for researchers and students to engage with the afterlife of criminological method.Part of the Routledge studies in Crime, Culture and Media, it introduces the importance and usefulness of hauntological methods in criminological research Hauntology becomes an ontological tool to 'examine the signifiers of silenced legacies of unresolved traumas from our past ' (pp.19-20), revealing colonial, epistemic violence that marginalizes and erases knowledge and peoples of non-Western origin.Drawing on Southern and Indigenous criminology, using alternative futures imagined in hauntological art such as Afrofuturism, the authors not only demand the exhumation of these past traumas buried within the discipline's taken-for-granted knowledge, but challenge us to 're-dream' (Fisher, 2013: 45) imaginaries of the future.Exploring hauntology as a 'speculative enterprise', the second chapter posits hauntology and spectrality as methods to overcome the limitations of the objective realism and linear historicism embedded in criminology.Focussing on how the 'not yet' may be interrogated, the chapter proposes participatory designs that are open-ended, inviting that which is unexpected and not fully concluded.The third chapter explores how hauntology can be used to interrogate the liminality of prisons, how they are discursively created sites that rely on social, temporal and physical distance from ordinary life.By exploring movements in time and space, such methods revitalize the study of penal institutions attending to the ways they cause rupture and illuminating how spectres of postcolonialism haunt ideas of future punishment.In Chapter 4, the spectrality of crime's imaginary is examined.Exploring how true-crime stories are underpinned by gothic, liminal elements enables a critical unpacking of how true-crime narratives are framed, whose viewpoints are prioritized and how mediated imagery of crime more closely relates to representations of social anxieties, often tied to gender and race, rather than representations of the 'real'.Delving into the spectral dimensions of mediated crime imagery, the 1438555C MC0010.