Narrative Habitus: Thinking Through Structure/Agency in the Narratives of Offenders

• In Event: Narrative Criminology I: What Stories Do and How They Do It

Abstract

Starting from the premise that experience is narratively constituted and future actions are oriented through the self as the protagonist in an evolving story, narrative criminology investigates how narratives motivate and sustain offending. Reviewing narrative criminological research, this paper contends that narrative criminology tends toward a problematic dualism of structure and agency, locating agency in individual narrative creativity and constraint in structure and/or culture. It argues for a different conceptualisation of narrative as embodied, learned and generative, drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Social action, including narrative, is structured via the habitus, which generates but does not determine social action. Understanding individual narratives as an example of ‘regulated improvisation’ offers a more sociological understanding of narrative, better able to explain offending with reference to social inequalities. The paper concludes by discussion the implications of such a shift for narrative interventions toward offending.

Author

• Jennifer Fleetwood, University of Leicester