PPT - Jock Young - CriminoIogical Imagination

5/26/2018 PPT - Jock Young - CriminoIogical Imagination

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Jock Young:

The

Criminological

Imagination

Introduction: The Legacy of C. Wright Mills


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Mills published SociologicalImagination in 1959

--advocated sociology as avocation

--idealized craftsmanship: joyof writing, weaving theory andresearch, conceptuallyinsightful and empiricallygrounded

the key nature of the SI wasto situate human biography inhistory and in social structure to bridge gap betweenhuman actors and historicaland social settings in which

they find themselves.

He talks of the earthquakesof social change, and of

widespread feelings of peoplefeeling themselves adrift, ofbeing unable to understandwhat is happening to them, ofindividualizing their problems.

Nowadays men often feel that

their private lives are a seriesof traps.

if the downside of such amomentum is feelings ofentrapment and alienation, the

upside is an increasedreflexivity, a dereification of thesocial world, and anawareness of the ever-presentpossibility of change.


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The sociological imagination:

--personal troubles of a milieu

--public issues of structure

In a world characterized byinstability, in work, family and

community In late modern social

order chaos of reward and identity

people face an existential quandray;

their uncertainty can be interpreted inself-blame and failure, yet the

widespread nature of economic and

cultural instability and its daily

dissemination on the global media,

facilitate feelings of connectedness and

of recognizing the parallel nature of the

social condition

Mills identifies two

opposing tendencies

where academic

sociology loses

contact with social

reality

-- abstracted

empiricism

-- grand theory

Goode says there

has been a neglect of

the transformative

politics in Mills work


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1. Closing down the imagination

the confetti of Greek letters

seems in a different universe

from the louche bars, dope

smokers, snitches and police

harassment in downtown

Pittsburgh

abstracted empiricism

the data mysteriously detach

themselves from their subject

matter and lose all context

paradoxically, the less their

contact with the subject matter

the more knowledgeable they

feel

whole swaths of theory and

controversy are simply not

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--the war against drugs

--the failure of deterrence --racism in drug enforcement

--drug war counterproductive

--police corruption common

this is the study of deviance

without deviance


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the authors.the more they are distanced from what

they are studying, the more secure they feel

How do we understand such research?

as theory atrophies, methodology becomes a substitute And what of Mills three guidelines? there is no history

the actors have no past, and their future is mundane

The researchers are searching for generalizations

independent of people, structure, history and place --the new social science orthodoxy looks to positivism

--compare to the work of Bourgois on crack dealers


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Let me introduce you to the datasaur

The elevation of the journal

--theories decontextualized to become operational

what we need is a method which can deal withreflexivity, contradiction, tentativeness a method whichis sensitive to the way people write and rewrite theirpersonal narratives.

Mertons social structure and anomie manifestly

connects private troubles to public issues where is hisevidence that the american dream is a sop for thosewho might reel against the entire structure were thisconsoling hope removed?


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bracketing off issues of power

and inequality [is] more

pronounced in criminology

the criminological gaze is

more exposed to problems ofpower, stigmatization, and the

context of values than any

other area of social sciences

norms are formed, broken,

disputed and selectively

enforced deviance isenacted and concealed

the 1960s and 1970s was the

time of a cultural turn a

stress on the interpretative

rather than the mechanistic

focusing on the way in which

human actors generate

meaning consisting of two

strands, subcultural and

labelling, phenomenological

and constructionist p19


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--statistics are social constructions

--deviance is not in the act but a quality imposed on it

--meaning is dependent on social contexts

--people construct meaning, in sitns beyond their control --individuals have to be placed within wider structure

--contested definitions of deviance in pluralistic society

--agencies of social control impose defns of powerful


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The hubris of positivism:

--growth of the criminal justice system

--universities have expanded to train practitioners

--market society has become dominant ethos

--qualitative methods seen as 2ndto quantitative

the affinity between positivist criminology and thebureaucratic needs of the criminal justice system is aquestion of shared notions of ontology and of social

order, of world views which are coincident in theirmapping of the social world and the place of the deviantwithin it, backed by common anxieties about socialorder.


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7. Mayhem, Magic and Margaret Mead

late modernity brings with a loosening of the ties

between social structure and behaviour, between

material predicament and the subcultural solutions which

human beings create in order to facilitate and give

meaning to their lives

Words become blurred, eg. marriage, gay, rape

in late modernity such narratives not only change but

they are more fragmented, they are contested and they

co-exist, That is, there are several possible/plausiblenarratives available at any one time. And in a media

saturated society these narratives are freely available ...


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none of the choices available has the weight of absolute

certainty as in the past. Narratives lose their singularity,

their cohesion and their gravitas. The narratives are

not only contested, but they are not coherent, well

formed: they are contradictory and inconsistent not onlybetween themselves but within themselves. There is

always an element of mayhem in late modernity.

[yet] much ethnographic work has] vignettes of urban

life which have as much validity as a posed photographat a formal wedding. It replaces the reification of

numbers with the reification of representation.


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The meta-narrative of the lensinterpretive structure

Ethnography and incoherencehomo performans

The metaphor of the photographif reality

Hiatus and relationshiporientalism and power The ethnographers audience readers choose

Ethnography and the end of innocenceMead

-- representativeness, masquerading, translation probs

-- arguments over what counts as sex

-- the influence of the meta-narrative

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PPT - Jock Young - CriminoIogical Imagination