Transgressive Criminology

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

Transgressive criminology moves beyond conventional methods in the sociological study of crime to understand transgressive behaviors in late-modernity. We look at transgression from a variety of actors – from the cultural worlds of New York’s con artists to willful down and out New Orleans outsiders to state and non-state actors banishing migrants from their homeland and engaging in violence and terrorism to marginalized groups speaking truth. The study of transgression requires unique methods – and even a transgressive researcher – to delve into the cultural lives of the new deviants of our age. This approach takes seriously the warnings of Jock Young’s criminological imagination to link subjective experience to objective structures in the context of culture. Navigating through biographies, cultures, structures, and histories provides fascinating portrayals of creative transgressive subworlds responding to domination and control in an era that combines Huxley’s brave new world with Orwellian dystopia. The rapidly transforming social world produces new forms of structural contradictions where emerging subcultures develop in response to their collectively experienced structural problems. Dialectical battles exist between structures of power and new forms of agency and resistance that play out in a post-modern theater in what is becoming an age of global transgression.

Sub Unit

• Area III: Perspectives on Crime and Criminal Behavior / 2: Conflict, Oppression, Injustice, and Inequality

Individual Presentations

• Imagining Terrorism, Imagining War and the Paradox of Violence - Jayne Mooney, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

• Down and Out in New Orleans: Notes from the Urban Underbelly - Peter Marina, University of Wisconsin - La Crosse

• How Transgressive Can Social Control Be? Gang Members in the Ministry of the Interior - David Brotherton, The Graduate Center, CUNY

• Fuck the Police!: Parrhesiastic Speech from Below? - Albert de la Tierra, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Chair

• Peter Marina, University of Wisconsin - La Crosse