Review 1 of "Everyday Aesthetics, Space, and the Sensory: Fear of Crime and Affect in Inner Sydney"

Vote: Publish pending minor changes

[For votes to count, referees must reasonably explain why they voted as they did. Thus, please explain your vote. If you voted to publish pending minor changes, specify each change, why it is needed, and, possibly, how it should/could be done.]

This paper is a clear and compelling intervention into research on ‘the fear of crime’ using the affective and the sensory as important dimensions through which fear is constructed, communicated, and understood. The paper’s use of these conceptual and material registers is engaging and novel, and represents some of the ways that emergent frameworks of ‘the sensory’ and ‘the affective’ in criminology might be put to work in research agendas across a range of topics and issues. There is little question, then, that the paper is an original, compelling, useful, unique and timely intervention into qualitative (critical) criminology, and that it moreover suggests that the sensory and the affective might continue to penetrate other disciplinary tendencies like cultural criminology and others that are still well outside of the umbrella of criminology like risk and security studies, geography, critical ontology, etc. The paper’s issues are all more of less perfunctory, and largely concern things like spelling, grammar, and syntax. Much of this comes down to subjective style, but the paper has a few minor issues in this respect: an errant italicization of “we noted” in the opening paragraph of the introduction, for example. These will each, I imagine, be caught and corrected by a thorough proofreading, but such a proofreading is in order prior to publication.