The Street and the Security Field: Forming a Bourdieusian Urban Criminology

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

Abstract

Shammas and Sandberg (2015) in their analysis rightly point to the partial incorporation of Bourdieusian concepts that appear to be shy of the in their use of 'field'. The risk of this could be to strip any critical value from Bourdieu’s work. It is this value that we must preserve from Bourdieu’s legacy to form a critical criminology that is empirically rigorous, theoretically adventurous and that avoids the tendency towards ‘dogma’ (see Burawuoy, 2005). On the other hand, while field as a concept has merit, its theoretical value diminishes when viewed in isolation from ideas such as symbolic space, social space and physical space which enable a more critically engaged power analysis and the promise of a sociological criminology of domination and suppression. The paper aims to dialogue between the ideas of ‘street’ and field together with physical space especially in the way in which collective striving creates urban form. Two ideas are critical in this endeavour – the domination of (i) physical space as the long run evolutionary logic of the state and (ii) the formation of habitus as a system of commonly held, coded understandings. This paper draws upon previous field research on the mobilisation of crime prevention as symbolic violence and reflects on current field research exploring the constitution of the security field.

Author

• Matt Bowden, Dublin Institute of Technology