Slipping the Line

This book brings a new spatial analysis to gang territories through the concept of the gang assemblage- the variety of actors, contexts, and practices that create and maintain these spaces. This conceptualization helps overcome the tendency of gang literature to succumb to the gang territorial trap, the tendency to assume gang territories are fixed and static containers of gang life. Drawing on multi-sited qualitative fieldwork in central Canada, interviews with gang and non-gang-affiliated residents, police, and administrators show gang territories being made material through a wide variety of daily embodied practices. Recognizing the role of multiple actors encourages a relational ethics of accountability between bodies, practices, and place that challenges the often-naturalized connections between race, space, and crime. Understanding gang space as enacted through embodied material practices provides an alternative way to think through, trace, and disrupt these associations.

Brings together a new materialist approach to the study of criminal spaces Studies gang territories as urban spaces Expands gang research by highlighting gang behaviours and processes outside the scope of criminal enterprise

Auteur

Amelia Curran, PhD, is an Instructor in the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. She has published in Canadian Journal of Law and Society, Critical Sociology, Critical Social Policy.

Contenu
Chapter 1: Invisibility, Materiality, and Gang Spaces.- Chapter 2 : The Gang Assemblage.- Chapter 3 : Gangs and Territory.- Chapter 4 : Resident Bodies and Gang Territory.- Chapter 5 : Policing the Box.- Chapter 6: Relational Ethics of Accountability