Vertigo, Drift, and Dislocation

• In Event: Jock Young Memorial Panel on Cultural Criminology

Abstract

Among cultural criminology’s central themes is Jock Young’s notion of vertigo—or more precisely, the vertiginous dynamics of late modernity. From Young’s view, the contemporary unraveling of old certainties, the failing foundations of economic and social identity, have produced a broad sense of dizzying disorientation, and with it new forms of crime and transgression. More recently, Ferrell has developed within cultural criminology the notion of drift—the phenomenon of spatial and normative dislocation, and of uncharted movement amidst social institutions and situations—and has likewise argued that this drift constitutes a key trajectory of late modernity. Coexisting in this way within cultural criminology, these notions of vertigo and drift nonetheless tap into different social spheres, and conceptualize connections to crime and transgression differently as well. Still, when considered in combination, the two concepts establish a distinct historical and theoretical orientation within cultural criminology. Together they also suggest for criminology new methodological orientations attuned to uncertainty, mobility, and ephemerality.

Author

• Jeff Ferrell, Texas Christian University / University of Kent, UK