Narratives Of Criminality Research Articles

Schools and the Rise of Mass Incarceration in a Post-Brown World

In this article Matthew B. Kautz theorizes schools as unique carceral institutions with the capacities to criminalize, surveil, discipline, and punish and demonstrates how they have mobilized these unique abilities to establish social control. By tracing the development of school disciplinary policy and practice following Brown v. Board of Education, the essay illuminates how policy makers produced politically salable narratives of criminality to rationalize the expansion of jails and prisons during a period of major economic restructuring. Engaging with this history, Kautz provides a different lens for considering contemporary education policy.

The Hero and the Victim: Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War Fiction (book) <br>

The Hero and the Victim: Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War Fiction (book) <br>

Place and Space in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Old London: The Thieves’ House on West Street

Abstract The proposed demolition in 1844 of the infamous ‘Thieves' House’, a dilapidated structure situated on West Street in the notorious London slum of West Smithfield, was the focus of great public interest. Thousands of spectators reportedly came to see the house in the days leading up to its destruction, with some privileged individuals given lamp-lit tours of its interior. An unremarkable facade belied its strange internal construction, which incorporated trap doors, false walls and secret passages. These were described in detail in several journalistic accounts in which the house was imagined as a lair of thieves and murderers, fitted out for the commission and concealment of crime. The house seized the imagination of both authors and artists, becoming the inspiration for serialized fiction, three dramas, and a large body of drawings and prints. While the various representations of it foreground the familiar ‘slum’ narratives of dereliction, degeneration and criminality, this article uncovers a counter-narrative of nostalgia and regret for the old city as a space shaped by the needs of its inhabitants, in contrast to the emerging metropolis designed for the circulation of labour and capital.

The Hero and the Victim: Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War Fiction

Hero and the Victim: Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War Fiction analyzes several works of literary fiction, and one popular memoir, by American authors about the U.S. military experience in the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011. In contrast to the emphasis of most ancient war literature on the figure of the warrior-as-hero, and the growing modern emphasis on the figure of the soldier-as-victim, Iraq War fiction reflects the troubled emergence of a new narrative template for war literature: the story of the ordinary soldier as a wrongdoer or even criminal. Iraq War fiction is haunted by depictions of moral injury and expressions of unresolved guilt. The dissertation argues that the emphasis on criminality in Iraq War fiction can be partly explained by the rise of moral cosmopolitanism and its blurring of the traditional conceptual lines between war and crime.

Bias in the Treatment of Non-Germans in the British and American Military Government Courts in Occupied Germany, 1945–46

AbstractNon-Germans—particularly “displaced persons”—were routinely blamed for crime in occupied western Germany. The Allied and German fixation on foreign gangs, violent criminals, and organized crime syndicates is well documented in contemporary reports, observations, and the press. An abundance of such data has long shaped provocative historical narratives of foreign-perpetrated criminality ranging from extensive disorder through to near uncontrolled anarchy. Such accounts complement assertions of a broader and more generalized crime wave. Over the last 30 years, however, a literature has emerged that casts doubt on the actual extent of lawlessness during the occupation of the west and, in turn, on the level non-German participation in crime. It may be that extensive reporting of non-German criminality at the time reflected the preexisting bigotries of Germans and the Allies, which when combined with anxieties about social and societal integrity became focused on the most marginalized groups in postwar society. This process of “group criminalization” is common and can have different motivations. Regardless of its cause, it was clearly evident in postwar western Germany and we hypothesized that it should have created harsher outcomes for non-German versus German criminal defendants when facing the Allied criminal justice system, such as greater rates of conviction and harsher punishments. This hypothesis was tested using newly collected military government court data from 1945 to 1946. Contrary to expectations, we found a more subtle bias against non-Germans than expected, which we argue reveals important characteristics about the US and British military government criminal justice system.

A criminal mind? A damaged brain? Narratives of criminality and culpability in the celebrated case of Aaron Hernandez

This article examines the media discourse surrounding the life and death of former National Football League player Aaron Hernandez, who died by suicide while incarcerated for first-degree murder. As a postmortem analysis found evidence of notable degenerative brain disease, differing explanations and speculations remain about the causes of his criminal behavior. This analysis illustrates how journalistic narratives attribute Hernandez’s criminality to either the material composition of his damaged brain or how his tumultuous background affected psychological makeup. Both narratives minimize the structural and political economic conditions that enabled this particular case of celebrated criminality. Cultural criminological and socio-legal insights aid in elucidating how notions of racialized masculinity and neurocriminology come to constitutively inform framings of Hernandez’s crimes, motivations, and actions while also directing critical attention away from the influence of relevant institutions, particularly sport, and instrumentalizing the role of violence. This article concludes with a reflection on the underpinning tensions revealed through depictions of Hernandez, his mind, and his brain, arguing that they surpass news and media stories and actually implicate debates about the growing influence of neuroscience in understandings of social problems, including crime.

Charles Marville and the Landscapes of the Carrières d’Amérique

Charles Marville’s photographs of Paris preserve the look of streets slated for demolition under Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This article examines his photographs of the Carrières d’Amérique, or America Quarries – gypsum quarries in the outlying Parisian neighbourhood of Belleville. At a time when the rezoning of districts that were formerly extra muros was still controversial, Belleville was seen as a crime-ridden area. Marville’s photographs become documents that refute contemporary narratives of criminality. Borrowing Walter Benjamin’s view that the city ‘opens up’ to the flâneur ‘as a landscape’, the article analyses Marville’s landscapes of the Carrières d’Amérique as images that juxtapose the city, the work site, and the no-man’s land or terrains vagues at Paris’s outer limits.

The Waste Products of the American Dream: framing Black cultural pathology in the dominant news media in times of crisis

ABSTRACTIn The Waste Products of the American Dream I argue that the ability to influence the popular narrative that frames the Black communities' public existence is critical if the Black urban poor is going to draw the nation’s attention to the structural and historical forces that create and continue to perpetuate concentrated Black poverty today. More specifically, enticing white “common sense” fears about Black life, culture, and space became a strategic political maneuver that conservative politicians began to use in the late 1960s by suggesting that all “civil rights brought was rioting.” The mainstream media would reproduce these narratives of Black criminality to further demonize low-income inner city communities and its inhabitants as the culprits of urban decay, delivering the state from any blame for the creation of concentrated poverty and the spatial mismatch that went along with social isolation. To illustrate how this discursive politics works to frame North Minneapolis and its residents as always already deviant, I did a comparative reading of the 2011 North Minneapolis tornado media coverage between the historic Black press and local mainstream press. I did this to show how important it is for the creation of Black counterpublic spaces that the historic Black press maintains as a way to take control of the community's narrative while also highlighting how the mainstream press simply relies on readily available stock narratives of Black cultural pathology which blame the victims of disaster for their plight with an uncanny similarity to Hurricane Katrina coverage.

Asco, Chris Burden, and the Politics of the Misfire

This article draws out the ‘politics of the misfire’ as a process constituted in part by discursive articulations of the ‘misuse’ of guns, and in part by mediated visual narratives of criminality cultivated in American visual culture. Specifically, the author examines how the decades-long historiography of artist Chris Burden’s iconic artwork, Shoot (1971), relies upon and perpetuates spatially racialized and gendered notions of innocence and safety. She argues that the conceptual art collective Asco’s theorizing of misfires in response to their vulnerability as Chicanos in America provides a vital framework for recognizing how the neutralized archetype of white masculinity, simultaneously innocent and lawless, animates and sustains the legacy of Shoot. Through consideration of geographies of cumulative vulnerability, access to resources, and systemic racism this article links processes of art historical canonization to discriminatory practices that structurally oppress people of color in the United States.

(Mis)Taken Identities: Reclaiming Identities of the “Collective Black” in Mathematics Education Research Through an Exercise in Black Specificity

This chapter reviews two strands of identity-based research in mathematics education related to Black children, exemplified by Martin (2000) and Nasir (2002). Identity-based research in mathematics education is a burgeoning field that is disrupting narratives around the meanings of mathematical competence and brilliance. We argue that the identities of Black children as doers and knowers of mathematics are often confused (or mistaken) with stereotypical images of various social identities, as well as wrongly confiscated (or mis-taken), in order to perpetuate persistent narratives of inferiority, criminality, and general ineducability of these children. We use Black children as a particular example within the mathematics education research literature and argue that children within a so-called “collective Black” are subject to the same racial scripts that organize mathematics teaching and learning. While we acknowledge that important lines of identity-based research have emerged to reclaim the rightful identities of Black children and those within the collective Black, we conclude with a critique of this recent literature in which we note the troubling exclusion of girls and young children.

Spectacle in international criminal law: the fundraising image of victimhood

This paper explores the relationship between spectacle and law as it unfolds in international criminal law. The spectacularised construction of the victim of international crime as a replica of the familiar fundraising image of victimhood serves as a critical lens into narratives of international criminality and its seeming antithesis of humanitarianism.

Busting Blackbeard's ghost: Somali piracy in historical context

ABSTRACTDespite renewed interest, one area of piracy studies that can be improved is that of historical comparison. Most studies operate under the belief that piracy is an action similar enough to be compared across time and space. Yet piracy is a socially constructed concept that only has meaning within a narrative and most ‘waves’ of piracy are characterized by more than one narrative. Thus, comparing all acts of piracy across time and space necessarily means accepting a particular narrative about piracy as true. Much historical-comparative work on piracy compares contemporary piracy to that of the ‘golden age’ of piracy in the eighteenth century. By focusing on the narratives of both pirates and counter-pirates, piracy in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century is more comparable to contemporary piracy in the Gulf of Aden. Both ‘waves’ were characterized by competing narratives of pirates defending local interests vs. the counter-piracy narratives of criminality. This approach highlights similar dynamics in each that can help researchers and policymakers make sense of piracy in the twenty-first century. In particular both ‘waves’ were characterized by the rise of local political formations built around piracy and the denial of the political content of piracy by counter-pirates.

Making a promised land: Harlem in twentieth-century photography and film

Making a Promised Land examines the interconnected histories of African American representation, urban life, and citizenship as documented in still and moving images of Harlem over the last century. Paula J. Massood analyzes how photography and film have been used over time to make African American culture visible to itself and to a wider audience and charts the ways in which the Mecca of the New Negro became a battleground in the struggle to define American politics, aesthetics, and citizenship. Visual media were first used as tools for uplift and education. With Harlem's downturn in fortunes through the 1930s, narratives of black urban criminality became common in sociological tracts, photojournalism, and film. These narratives were particularly embodied in the gangster film, which was adapted to include stories of achievement, economic success, and, later in the century, a nostalgic return to the past. Among the films discussed are Fights of Nations (1907), Dark Manhattan (1937), The Cool World (1963), Black Caesar (1974), Malcolm X (1992), and American Gangster (2007). Massood asserts that the history of photography and film in Harlem provides the keys to understanding the neighborhood's symbolic resonance in African American and American life, especially in light of recent urban redevelopment that has redefined many of its physical and demographic contours.

Fashioning an Ex-crook Self: Citizenship and Criminality in the Work of Netley Lucas

This essay uses the autobiographical and journalistic work of the confidence trickster Netley Lucas to explore the possibilities and problems of writing as an ex-crook in inter-war Britain. In so doing, it considers the intersections between emerging forms of mass culture, popular and scientific narratives of criminality, and increasingly heated debates about the social and institutional management of crime. This case study provides an opportunity to think critically about the extent to which inter-war criminology was the modernizing project it often claimed to be. In the hands of Lucas and others, different modes of writing about crime bled into one another. Older forms of criminal confession coexisted with 'modern' criminological knowledge as mutually constitutive ways of apprehending the social.

SIN, SAINTS, AND SHEEP IN SARDINIA1

Narratives of Catholicism, gender, and criminality are entangled with social constructions of ‘resistance’ to a new Gennargentu National Park on areas of traditional common lands in central Sardinia, Italy. Embodied identities are strategically implicated in moral discourses of grassroots opposition to a park. The notion of Sardinian resistance as a form of cultural authenticity is rooted in a local sphere of social practices and expectations that are not shared by the wider Italian or European public. Ethnography in the town of Orgosolo demonstrates that a ‘politics of the weak’ can reframe relations of authority in local spheres and work to empower cultural recognition and control over common lands. Transgressive acts of violence, however, highlight embedded tensions, ambiguities, and disruptions in local identity practices. The gendered construction of cultural discourses in Orgosolo points to the paradox of a politics that seeks to affirm the authority of embodied traditions yet actually perpetuates ambivalent stereotypes based on cultural essentialism.