Thug Criminology: A Call to Action
Thug Criminology combines the urgent and as yet silenced voices of former gang/street-involved peoples turned academics, alongside their allies, in order to challenge and disrupt mainstream and academic knowledge about urban youth gangs specifically, and the "streets" more broadly.
The book questions how the "streets" - and the racialized and marginalized urban communities who inhabit them - are researched, taught, and subsequently politicized. It looks at who gets to produce such knowledge, who benefits from such knowledge, and whose voices are privileged within dominant academic and public policy discourses. Drawing on decolonizing methodologies, the book seeks to give voice to scholars with lived experience of a "street" or gang life. Adam Ellis, Olga Marques, and Anthony Gunter reclaim the terms thug and gang to reconstruct the narrative around street-involved youth, seeing them not as criminals but rather as survivors of historical oppression and trauma. Challenging the colonial structure of criminology and other disciplines that focus on street crime, Thug Criminology aims to disrupt and disentangle the knowledge that has been produced on gangs and urban violence.
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Become an affiliateOlga Marques is an associate professor of criminology and justice at Ontario Tech University.
Anthony Gunter is a senior lecturer and programme lead for childhood and youth studies at The Open University.
"This volume offers an authentic insight into the tensions and challenges of street lives merged with academic lives. It challenges criminological orthodoxies without compromise, but with richness, poignancy, and foresight. We are challenged to think about who the real quantitative and qualitative 'thugs' are in the knowledge production enterprise. This is an essential and righteous contribution."--Coretta Phillips, Professor of Criminology and Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, and author of The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Social Relations among Prisoners