Public Criminology in the Cold City: Engagement and Possibility ANDREW WOOLFORD AND BRYAN HOGEVEEN ABSTRACT This paper, an exercise in autoethnography, examines how our public criminological engagement with inner city criminal jus- tice agencies influenced our conceptualization of the “Cold City”—a term we use to describe the shifting conditions of care in urban environments whereby one is compelled to feel less re- sponsible for the concrete (as opposed to abstract and general- ized) lives of others. In particular, we explore the frustrations of public criminology, as efforts to envision justice anew and fa- cilitate care come up against the structural limitations of the bu- reaucratic field in its contemporary neoliberal guise. In such circumstances, critical scholarship offers an outlet for contend- ing with these frustrations, but also a means for imagining nov- el justice possibilities and revised forms of public criminologi- cal engagement. INTRODUCTION Critical criminology, as we have conceptualized it, is a process of opening up new spaces of possibility (Hogeveen and Wool- ford 2006; see also Pavlich 2001). The critical criminologist, armed with the tools of critique, sets herself against an already fabricated world of crime and crime policy bound by specific (and quite arbitrary) ontologies of harm and justice. Critique is our means to trouble these boundaries and to push toward new justice horizons not strictly beholden to the architecture of a 17