Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours
This is a podcast where we treat movies, television, and other popular culture artifacts not just as entertainment, but as cultural evidence. As artifacts that reveal how we think about crime, justice, power, and culture. I’m Kevin Buckler, PhD in Criminal Justice, and a professor at a four-year public university. On Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours, I bring you sharp, unfiltered content about how film, television, and media shape the way we understand crime, law, and justice — and what those stories reveal about our legal system, our communities, and the world around us.
Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours
Latest Episodes
S 1 E 9 American (Rural) Crime Landscapes: Sheriff Taylor's Small Town America — Mayberry and the Myth of Rural Justice
For generations, "Mayberry" has served as shorthand for a simpler, safer, and more orderly America. But what does The Andy Griffith Show actually tell us about crime and justice? In this episode of Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours, host Kev...
S 1 E 8 American (Rural) Crime Landscapes: Shirley Jackson’s The Summer People — Rural Degeneration or Misplaced Fear of the Rural Other?
American Crime Landscapes is a series exploring how popular culture imagines crime, justice, deviance, and social control through place. Across novels, films, television, music, and other cultural artifacts, the series examines how urban, subur...
S 1 E 7 American Crime Landscapes: An Introduction to the Crime and Place Series (Urban, Suburban, and Rural)
This is the introductory episode of a new series of Crime and Pop Culture Office Hours. The series is called "American Crime Landscapes." It begins with a simple question: What do we really mean when we say urban, suburban, and rural? In this i...
S 1 E 6 The Juvenile Super Predator: The Monster We Imagined and the Crime Wave That Never Came
This episode of Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours examines the rise and impact of the juvenile “super-predator” myth through two influential 1990s articles by John DiIulio. Using these texts as cultural artifacts, the episode explor...
S 1 E 5 "The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House": Black Christmas (1974) and 1970s Cultural Anxieties
Black Christmas (1974) is more than an early slasher film. It is a reflection of 1970s cultural anxiety. Set in a sorority house during the holidays, the film follows a group of young women stalked by an unseen killer whose threatening...