Nicholas Chagnon

• University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

In this paper, we examine the role played by popular media in propagating myths around policing and buttressing the prison-industrial complex (PIC). We provide a conceptual framework for understanding how policing logics are amplified, contested, and resonate through popular media as part of a hegemonic process to sustain the PIC. We suggest that t...

By the close of the 2024 spring semester, Israel’s siege on Gaza had inspired mass student protests on campuses around the United States. The varying responses to that activism have exposed profound political tensions, raising numerous questions relevant for us as cultural criminologists. The language employed to justify police repression of protes...

High-profile trials are often held up as emblematic of social justice causes, but this often obscures rather than clarifies justice issues for the public. Trial outcomes may be seen as proxies of much deeper, structural problems, though media coverage routinely focuses on singular, criminal justice outcomes. This study uses a press analysis of two...

In this paper, we analyze ways that oppositional rhetoric—specifically cries of “moral panic” and “witch hunt”—resonates in conversations around campus sexual assault and MeToo. We trace the discursive arc around sexual aggression in popular media and reveal a pattern of ideological inversion. Initially, narratives privileged victim-centered perspe...

In this paper, we analyze ways that oppositional rhetoric-specifically cries of "moral panic" and "witch hunt"-resonates in conversations around campus sexual assault and MeToo. We trace the discursive arc around sexual aggression in popular media and reveal a pattern of ideological inversion. Initially, narratives privileged victim-centered perspe...

This article analyzes coverage of the Stanford, California rape case, using a qualitative thematic press analysis to demonstrate how “rape culture” and penal populist framing intersected. Pulling from national newspapers, as well as diverse online fora, we show how characteristics of the case such as the perceived leniency toward the accused were f...

This research examines chronological patterns in the social construction of violence against women in the United States and abroad as represented by coverage in the New York Times. It is found that while criminal justice–oriented discourse dominates coverage, the news is less often applying a social problem frame to violence against women occurring...

Police accountability is among the most prominent criminal justice issues in America today. Accounts of police misconduct captured by new communication and information technologies have played a central role in elevating this issue. On the continental US, the Black Lives Matter movement has driven these events, lodging the political debate in the l...

Criminology has historically exhibited a significant gender bias. Yet, spurred by feminist efforts, criminology has become more gender-inclusive recently. Research has documented this bias, and gains made by women. However, much of this research examines only gender bias, ignoring other important factors such as race. In this article, we examine ge...

This paper examines a case of trial by media revolving around a routine property crime in Hawaii. Trial by media is an emerging concept in crime media research; it illuminates how 21st-century mediascapes facilitate dynamic and interactive representations of crime, which may create spaces for alternative justice processes. Here we examine the impac...

Students who take critical sociology courses often report feeling discouraged about their ability to change large-scale social-structural problems. To redress this perceived lack of agency and control, we modified an upper-division sociology of popular culture course to include a studentowned activism project that would entail minimal teacher direc...