Samenvatting

This article reports on the 4th Narrative Criminology Conference held in Antwerp in July 2023. Questions like: ‘how to do justice to the lived reality of victims and offenders?’, ‘how to empathize with subjects’ sense of victimization when they have been convicted of abhorrant acts?’ and ‘how to put into words experiences that subjects cannot adequately describe?’ all relate to and are significant for restorative thinking. Keynotes, presentations and masterclasses showed the transformative power of storying experiences of crime and victimization. Even though restorative justice was not explicitly addressed, the importance of defining the self and the other in order to restore their relationship was well-represented during the conference. In this article, we report on a variety of presentations that were given during the conference, e.g., keynotes on narrative victimology, masterclasses in analysing the unsaid and conversations on visual criminology.