Towards a Bourdieusian Criminology: Theorising Inequality and Injustice

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

In recent years, the French ‘maverick of ideas’, Pierre Bourdieu, has become increasingly influential across the social sciences. In sociology and anthropology, education and health, Bourdieu’s wide-ranging efforts to interrogate questions of power, domination and inequality have come to occupy a central position. There is an increasing sense in which criminology may be beginning to undergo its own ‘Bourdieusian moment’. Bourdieu’s theoretical vocabulary recognises the mutually constitutive role of structure, culture and agency in processes of crime, criminalisation and cultural production, and the relationships of power and domination operating between these fields of action. Recent contributions have, for example, drawn on Bourdieusian vocabularies to explore the patterned inequalities embedded in street cultures across a range of geographical contexts, and the interlocking patterns of power and domination through which criminal acts become subsumed within the logic of the bureaucratic fields of the courts, the media and prison. This panel will draw together a number of contributors to these developing debates, combining empirical and theoretical applications of Bourdieu – and beyond – to develop a critical assessment of the task and promise of a Bourdieusian criminology.

Sub Unit

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

Individual Presentations

• The Street as an Affective Atmosphere - Daniel Matthews, University of Hong Kong; Alistair Fraser, University of Glasgow

• The Perils of Parole: California ‘Lifers’ and the Ideology of Insight - Victor Lund Shammas, University of Oslo

• The Life of Pablo: Examining the gangster as artist in the field of cultural production - Chris Richardson, Young Harris College

• Charting the Middle Ground: A Bourdieusian approach to violence perpetrated by women - Susan Batchelor, University of Glasgow

Chair

• Jennifer Fleetwood, University of Leicester

Discussant

• Sveinung Sandberg, University of Oslo