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18 Crime Media Culture 3 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/cmctre18 and id is 1 raw text is: C C Article Crime Media Culture 2022, Vol. 18(1) 3-20 Moved by fire: Green criminology TheAuthore 2020 in flux * Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1741659020958450 journals.sagepub.com/home/cmc Kajsa Lundberg SAGE The University of Melbourne, Australia Abstract The destructive bushfires in Australia 2019-2020 resonate with similar trends around the world as bushfire seasons are becoming longer and more pervasive. Yet, criminological analyses of bushfires are limited and tend to focus on the individual criminal subject and the act of arson, the crime of intentional fire starting. Encouragingly, green criminology, the criminological perspective dealing with environmental crimes and harms, is expanding the categories of offenders and victims of harm by, for example, highlighting non-human victims and harms perpetrated by the capitalist system. Nonetheless, even this perspective is inadequate to deal with the complex and ultimately mobile events of fire and their far-reaching consequences. This article brings green criminology in flux by drawing from the 'new mobilities paradigm', emphasising motion, temporality and the mobility of contemporary life. The new mobilities paradigm, or the 'mobility turn', has a lot to offer green criminology as is demonstrated here by way of scrutinising the mobility of fire. A mobile green criminology will help trace fire beyond static categories of offenders and victims and open up for more flexible and mobile categories of environmental harms as constructed, complex and unstable processes. Finally, a mobile analysis allows for a more complex and meaningful reading of criminological space, demonstrated by the relationship between social, aesthetic and cultural values of land, politics, power and fire-related behaviours, such as fire suppression or Aboriginal peoples' cultural burning practices. It is argued here that in order to understand the complex nature of fire, green criminology must attune to the intersections between fire, space, mobility and meaning. Keywords Bushfire, cultural burnings, fire, firestick farming, green criminology, meaning-making, mobile criminology, mobility turn, new mobilities paradigm, space Introduction Summarising 2019 in five words, following the popular hashtag #2019in5words, Thunberg (2019), an environmental activist from Sweden, wrote on Twitter 'Our house is on fire'. This speaks to what many people directly affected by bushfires have experienced around the world during recent years. Corresponding author: Kajsa Lundberg, Melbourne, Australia. Email: klundberg@student.unimelb.edu.au