Our growing Criminology list takes a critical stance and features boundary-pushing work with innovative, research-led publications.
A particular focus of the list are books that engage with our global social challenges, both on a local and international level. We aim to publish books in a wide range of formats that will have real impact and shape public discourse.
This paper explores the criminological scientific community in Chile from 1990 to 2020. We use the sociology of scientific knowledge as a conceptual framework to apply to the Chilean criminology development stage. We analyse the criminological community using social network analysis based on the co-affiliation networks of researchers (N=62) affiliated with research centres, think tanks and universities producing criminological knowledge. We describe the actors involved in the network of researchers and identify the clusters shaping the main areas of the country’s production and dissemination of criminological research. The findings reveal a low density between scholars in the network; the existence of central research topics related to citizen security and criminal law; the presence of clusters (for example, juvenile justice and prison studies, among others), and areas that are emerging in the production of criminological knowledge in Chile (cybercrime, crimmigration). We conclude that criminology in Chile is still in the amateur stage. However, there are signs of growing professionalisation in the discipline.
Since its founding, Convict Criminology (CC) has evolved into an international approach, group, organisation, and network with a relatively coherent set of objectives. Although little thought was put into CC’s development beyond the US, the original intent of CC was primarily to develop a network of individuals who were united around its core ideas. Due to both the constraints of international travel for ex-convicts and the financial burden for people to travel, originally it made best sense for people interested in the CC perspective to meet at the local level. Over time, because of advances in telecommunication platforms like Facetime, Skype, and Zoom, members of the CC network realised that meeting face-to-face on a regular basis was not necessary. Thus, the importance of local or even national approaches to CC were not necessary. This paper briefly examines the international components of CC and the authors’ views that, while individual country groups of CC members may have been advantageous in the early stages of CC, it is no longer necessary, if not counterproductive.
In recent decades the study of emotions in the daily lives and geographies of migrants has received growing attention. In this chapter, I discuss the emotional attachments expressed by young male migrants in relation to public spaces in Cork, Ireland. This chapter interrogates the interrelation of affect and emotion and ‘spatial belonging’ from a migrant perspective, and is based on a recent study of homemaking practices of two subgroups of young male migrants in Ireland: international students and refugees. The data collected through walking interviews and photo elicitation interviews show interesting similarities between these two different groups. This chapter focuses on public spaces as homes and thus offers a novel analysis of emotions within the context of migration of single young male migrants in Europe and their ways of creating a meaningful sense of spatial belonging within public spaces.
This chapter examines the experiences and life-worlds of young migrant women in Thembisa, a sprawling township on the outskirts of the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. Based on conversations and interviews in small hairdressing salons where the young women congregate, the chapter explores how they form relationships and build networks around what we refer to as ‘private-public’ spaces. ‘Private-public’ spaces describe the ways in which a space like a hair salon can be open to anyone on a busy, open street but also be a space for creating (sometimes temporary) friendships, networks and threads of trust among girls and young women looking for better futures in a different country. Exploring how the teenage girls, many of whom have become mothers themselves at a young age, do not fit the stereotypical picture of a vulnerable child migrant, the chapter argues for a greater focus on the realities and needs of migrant youth and especially girls as they move across borders, and base their survival on spaces which simultaneously expose and provide protection from the precarious experiences of everyday life in South Africa.
Esatis is an engaged slam poet from the Central African Republic. Nathan-2K is a Congolese gospel music guitarist. Both young men left their respective home towns and made their way to a foreign African megapolis in search of greener pastures. Based on two biographical trajectories, this chapter (1) problematises South–North migration and concentrates on trajectories within Africa; (2) questions the artificial migrant–refugee divide and; (3) challenges images of the vulnerable refugee/migrant and underlines self-affirmation, personal success and dignity instead. The biographic approach helps to contextualise important moments of decision in these young men’s biographical trajectories. Exploring these details leads to a deeper understanding of how lives of youth in urban Africa can unfold in a constant interplay between structure and agency (through music).
The city – rather than the state – plays an important role in refugee youth’s everyday experiences. In this chapter, we draw upon participatory research among young refugees and asylum seekers in Amsterdam to illustrate the lived experiences of these youngsters in public spaces in the urban fabric of Amsterdam. We illustrate their favourite places, the use and meaning of these spaces, and how these spaces impact their sense of belonging in both the Netherlands and Amsterdam. The findings show that it is not self-evident for refugee youth who are new to the city to immediately exploit the potential of public space. Semi-public spaces can fill an important role in providing a safe and meaningful space for refugees’ integration and participation in society. At the same time it is not self-evident to transmit these encounters beyond these semi-public places, which illustrates that conviviality is spatially bound to specific places.
A vision for social justice in the built environment suggests that urban planning is a political process that can and should enable the conditions for all city inhabitants to influence the spatial and material character of the urban public space. This chapter examines theoretical dimensions of the inclusive city, urban planning and the public space and connects these debates to findings from interviews conducted with refugee youth living in the city of Amman. These interviews reveal insight surrounding the everyday experiences of refugee youth and shed light on the challenges and transformative potential of inclusive planning. Building on this analysis, this chapter emphasises the criticality and necessity for inclusive urban planning processes as a means to encourage alternative and innovative ways to rethink urban politics, engage the urban political will of refugee youth and re-envision public space for a more socially just city.
The introductory chapter of the book explains the overall focus on refugee youth as active agents and our interest in urban space. By putting personal and everyday geographies of refugee youth central we do not overlook structural forms of exclusion that take place but we show how young people themselves make sense of their lives in the new places of arrival. By putting their experiences centre stage we move beyond the mainstream domains, formal community or organisational settings and locations. The various chapters in the book illustrate how our focus on public space offers opportunities to explore meaningful spaces for refugee youth that include spaces that might be created by refugee youth themselves. Moreover, this collection explores the lived experiences of refugee youth in urban public space in a highly diverse range of international contexts and with specific attention to gender which allows us to illustrate how urban public space is actively produced in many different ways.
This chapter considers how processes of dispossession are at the centre of contemporary struggles over public space, rights and political belonging, which refugees often become subject to and part of upon their arrival to a country of supposed refuge. In the midst of the recent ‘European refugee crisis’, the Danish government introduced a new law which enabled the Danish state to carry out a search-and-seize order on newly arrived refugees, seizing refugees’ cash, jewellery, electronics and other personal belongings. While this law might be seen as an exception to the humanitarian reception of refugees, I argue that we need to consider how processes of dispossession are at play within Western states’ treatment of refugees and racialised migrants more broadly. In this chapter, I examine dispossession as it relates to racialised youth (including refugees and migrants) in Denmark, focusing on the Danish Prime Minister’s most recent call to confiscate expensive down jackets, watches and mobile phones from so-called ‘indvandrerdrenge’ (immigrant boys) who are deemed to create insecurity in public spaces. Drawing on the analytic of dispossession, I show how processes of gendered and racialised othering are both discursively and materially constituted.
