Making Trouble: Cultural Constraints of Crime, Deviance, and Control

by Jeff Ferrell

Overview

In Making Trouble leading scholars in criminology, sociology, criminal justice, women's studies, and social history explore the mediated cultural dynamics that construct images and understanding of crime, deviance, and control. Contributors examine the intertwined practices of the mass media, criminal justice agencies, political power holders, and criminal and deviant subcultures in producing and consuming contested representations of legality and illegality. While the collection provides broad analysis of contemporary topics, it also weaves this analysis around a set of innovative and unifying themes. These include the emergence of "situated media" within and between the various subcultures of crime, deviance, and control; the evolution of policing and social control as complex webs of mediated and symbolic meaning; the role of power, identity, and indifference in framing contemporary crime controversies, with special attention paid to the gendered construction of crime, deviance and control; and the importance of historical and cross-cultural dynamics in shaping understandings of crime, deviance, and control.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780202306179
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	04/30/1999
Series:	Social Problems and Social Issues Series
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.32(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.07(d)
Lexile:	1410L (what's this?)

About the Author

Neil Websdale is associate professor of criminal justice, Northern Arizona University. He is the author of Rural Woman Battering and the Justice System: An Ethnography.

Jeff Ferrell is visiting professor of sociology, at Southern Methodist University and was Professor of Criminal Justice, Northern Arizona University. He is the author of Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy and was the recipient of the 1998 Critical Criminologist of the Year Award, presented by the Critical Criminology Division of the American Society of Criminology.

Table of Contents

Introduction - materials for "Making Trouble", Jeff Ferrell and Neil Websdale. Part 1 Constructions of history and myth: the elders were our textbooks - the importance of traditional stories in social control, Jon'a F. Meyer and Gloria Bogdan; the historical roots of tabloid TV crime, Paul Kooistra and John Mahoney; dominant ideology and drugs in the media, Craig Reinarman and Ceres Duncan. Part 2 Constructions of gender and crime: predators - the social construction of "stranger-danger" in Washington State as a form of patriarchal ideology, Neil Wedsale; media mysogyny - demonizing "violent" girls and women, Meda Chesney-Lind; the war against women - media representations of men's violence against women in Australia, Adrian Howe; detecting masculinity, Gray Cavender. Part 3 Constructions of subculture and crime: wild life - constructions and representations of yardies, Karim Murji; punky in the middle - cultural constructions of the 1996 Montreal summer uprisings (a comedy in four acts), Lauraine Leblanc; freight train graffiti - subculture, media, dislocation, Jeff Ferrell. Part 4 Constructions of policing and control: reflections - the visual as a mode of social control, Peter Manning; police homicide files as situated media substrates, Neil Websdale. Part 5 Constructions of crime and terrorism: Jihad as terrorism - the western media and the defamation of Quran, Fida Mohammed; fighting terrorism as if women mattered - anti-abortion violence as unconstructed terrorism, Philip Jenkins. Part 6 Conclusions and prospects: taking the trouble - concluding remarks and future directions, Neil Websdale and Jeff Ferrell.

Editorial Reviews

"Making Trouble is the latest in a series of collections on cultural criminology compiled by Northern Arizona University criminal justice professor Jeff Ferrell and various co-editors (in this case Neil Websdale). Ferrell, one of criminology's brightest Young Turks, is the leading exponent of cultural criminology. Making Trouble is overall a smart, fresh and insightful collection, Ferrell and company's best effort yet in their ongoing attempt to develop a cultural criminology that captures the excitement and turmoil of a postmodern age." —Michael Petrunik, Canadian Journal of Sociology Online

From the Publisher