Welcome to the Just Images podcast!
The podcast is made by students from the University of Stirling as an assignment on the module Cultural and Creative Criminology, led by Dr Phil Crockett Thomas. Each episode takes two artworks and discusses them in relation to criminological themes as chosen by the students. The podcast started in 2025, and new episodes will be released each time the module runs.
Episodes were researched, recorded and edited by students apart from the first episode, which is an interview with the researcher and artist Dr Lucy Cathcart Frödén, who kindly agreed to talk to Phil about her fascinating research and to give the students some insight into podcasting as a research practice. The images on the site were also created by students as part of the module.
As a module, Cultural and Creative Criminology is about how criminological issues are represented in work of art and popular culture. The Just Images podcast is named for a famous saying from the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard: ‘not a just image, just an image’ – in other words, artistic representations can never capture experience with absolute fidelity. In Camera Lucida, a beautiful meditation on photography and loss, the cultural theorist Roland Barthes searches for a photograph that could capture the essence of his late mother and muses on Godard’s phrase:
‘… my grief wanted a just image, an image which would be both justice and accuracy – justesse [trans: accuracy]: just an image, but a just image’ (Barthes, 1993: 70).
Barthes’s words articulate the emotional power of representations and our affective investment in them, even while we understand that they can’t represent the whole story. This is something we think about on the module, in the context of being critical scholars who are part of a society saturated with cultural representations of crime, harm, and justice. We really hope you enjoy listening to the podcast. If you have any questions, please get in touch at pc73[at]stir.ac.uk.
Special thanks to Rachelle Cobain for her advice on setting up this podcast. Rachelle hosts the wonderful Just Humans Podcast for the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, which is well worth a listen.
