Cultural criminology and its practices: a dialog between the theorist and the street researcher

Abstract

This paper sets out to explain to a sociological/criminological audience the theory and practice of what has become known as cultural criminology. The authors have approached this task as a dialog, a conversation, that brings together the critiques and abstractions of the theorist (Jock Young), with his 30-year involvement in the deviance field and the empirical data and experiences of the urban street researcher (David Brotherton) who has spent much of the last 12 years studying and working with gang members. Our aim is to show how this approach to the study of deviance is more appropriate in this period of late modernity than that which currently dominates the field, a positivistic fundamentalism bent on rendering human action into the predictable, the quantifiable, and the mundane.