The Double Marginality of Peripheral Locations

Through the main concepts of peripheral locations and double marginality, this chapter presents an innovative approach to reading and understanding European television crime series through a combined productional and representative perspective. Firstly, we introduce the concept of peripherality and the overall methodical approach to location studies. Secondly, we highlight how our dominant approach ‘desktop production studies’ serves as a way to gain practical insights into location placement strategies through online source intelligence and exploitation of ready-made deep texts from producers and creatives behind the series. Thirdly, the practical perspective is merged with a ‘textual’ approach to what we refer to as ‘the aesthetics of peripherality’, including the introduction of the concept ‘scenogeography’, approaches to peripheral panoramas and landscapes, screened borderscapes, and drone aesthetics. Finally, we emphasise how many series placed in the European peripheries employ forms of journey narratives and homecoming narratives as storytelling devices, presenting central characters as mobile, and mobility as a quintessential aspect of crime narratives. Altogether, these practical insights into textual representations of peripheries are summed up as a certain type of creative placemaking.