Bourdieu on the Block: New Criminologies of the Street

• In Event: Roundtable: Putting Bourdieu to Theoretical Work for Criminology--Exploring Potentialities, Challenges and Limits

Abstract

In recent years, Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ of habitus, field and capital have been put to work in the study of youth crime and street cultures across a range of geographical and cultural contexts. Through applications such as ‘street capital’ (Sandberg and Pederson 2011), ‘street social capital’ (Ilan 2013), ‘street habitus’ (Fraser 2013) and ‘street field’ (Shammas and Sandberg 2015), the street-worlds of young people in Oslo, Dublin and Glasgow have been illuminated in a way that unites structure, culture and agency whilst remaining grounded in lived experience. While there are striking similarities in the dispositions and traits exhibited by young people in each of these cities – and beyond – there remain equally critical points of difference, rooted in the divergent cultural, social and political trajectories of each city. Drawing on fieldwork in Glasgow, Chicago and Hong Kong, this paper seeks to to assess these various contributions in a comparative context, developing the concept of ‘homologies of habitus’ as means of capturing both similarity and difference.

Author

• Alistair Fraser, University of Glasgow