Jonathan Ilan

Street social capital in the liquid city

This article reflects on the lives of a group of young men on Ireland’s socio-economic periphery, focusing on how exclusion shapes their cultural orientation and orders their spatial practices. Whilst populist imaginaries and certain academic understandings of young, disadvantaged, urban males tend to cast them in the role of claiming and violently defending territories, their relationships to space may be considerably more transient and fluid. Within the late-modern ‘liquid city’ exclusion has cast the young men researched here into migratory practices, where they must negotiate relationships with potentially hostile peers in various parts of the urban environment. Adopting street cultural norms of rugged masculinity, crimino-entrepreneurialism and the recourse to violence can result in the accumulation of ‘street social capital’. This can allow disadvantaged young people to secure a sense of existential security, pleasurable experiences, disposable income and a culturally mediated notion of dignity, despite their spatial and socio-economic exclusion.

Reclaiming Respectability? The Class-cultural Dynamics of Crime, Community and Governance in Inner-city Dublin

This paper critically examines developments in Irish urban governance through an ethnographic account of one community’s historical memory and contemporary structure. During an era of rapid economic growth, the Irish state has courted previously excluded communities, offering them greater ‘inclusion’ as ‘partners’ in responding to urban decay and crime. The micro-governance structures this creates, however, become sites of contest between competing community factions and class-cultural imperatives. Tensions emerge between aspirational community leaders championing the aesthetics (if not the values) of ‘respectability’ and residual residents who are presented as ‘rough’. The paper demonstrates that nuances of class-cultural identity dictate the character of partnership governance at the community level with particular implications for local regeneration and crime control agendas.

‘If You Don’t Let Us In, We’ll Get Arrested’: Class-cultural Dynamics in the Provision of, and Resistance to, Youth Justice Work

Based on an ethnographic account of a youth justice project and its attendees, this article explores the tensions between culturally mediated constructions of appropriateness, both in terms of youth behaviour and state responses thereto. It argues that, through youth justice work, the state attempts to inculcate idealized behavioural expectations ‘downwards’ on those constructed as normatively imperilled. By contrast, client youth construct their conduct in light of their classed and gendered experiences of marginality, which prompt them towards resistance. Differential understandings amongst stakeholders complicate youth justice work; contested meanings between its agents and clients may, however, be fatal to its objectives.

‘The industry’s the new road’: Crime, commodification and street cultural tropes in UK urban music

With original authors and audiences from the most disadvantaged and excluded communities across Western society, urban music has been equally scorned and sought out for its referencing of, and/or association with, criminal activity. Urban music (such as rap from the United States) can be understood as generating both ‘respectable fears’ and ‘subcultural capital’, appealing to youthful consumers who are seduced by its ostensibly transgressive character. This appeal is linked to the urban communities which incubated and popularised both the music and the ‘street culture’ of its underprivileged population. The wisdom has followed that the more ‘ghetto’ the music, the greater its ability to court controversy and generate record sales. Interestingly, the latest generation of UK urban artistes has bucked this trend, eschewing violent imagery and metaphor, courting a ‘mainstream’ aesthetic and actively referencing ‘respectable’ routes to inclusion such as engaging with education and running small businesses. This paper reflects on British ‘grime’ music, demonstrating that new media and music industry democratisation can alter the manner by which crime and street culture are commodified. It argues that where there is a perception of threat connected to street-level urban music authored by those with supposed links to criminality, the lines between real crime and its mediated representation can become blurred. The authorities and the music industry may respond by effectively criminalising and excluding an entire genre. In the case of UK urban music, artistes have adopted a strategy to succeed within the mainstream industry which, as opposed to US rappers, involves muting their links to street culture.

Street‐Level Tort Law: The Bureaucratic Justice of Liability Decision‐Making

Most legal scholarship on tort focuses primarily on judicial decisions, but this represents only a limited aspect of tortious liability. The vast majority of decisions concerning tortious liability are made by bureaucrats. Unavoidably then, there are two tiers of justice in tort law. This article focuses on the lower tier – bureaucratic decision-making – arguing that the justice of bureaucratic decisions on tort should be considered on its own terms and not by judicial standards. We develop the notion of bureaucratic justice, applying a normative framework originally set out in relation to public administration. This enables an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of different ways of bureaucratically determining liability claims in tort. The regimes discussed concern the liability of public authorities, but decision makers comprise both state and non-state actors and the bureaucratic justice framework is, in principle, applicable to understand and evaluate the liability of both public and private actors.

Commodifying compliance? UK urban music and the new mediascape

Subcultural theory and cultural criminology have traditionally viewed ‘underground’ youth movements as providing images of deviance/resistance which the cultural industries harvest to turn a profit. The logic follows that street and sub cultures imbue products with a ‘transgressive edge’ that increases their appeal within youth markets. This paper uses the example of UK ‘grime’ music to demonstrate how this dynamic cannot be viewed as applying universally in contemporary times. Where their street orientated content is censured, many grime artistes express a desire for commercial success which would ultimately emerge through muting their rhetorical links to crime and violence and explicitly championing ‘mainstream’ values. This case is used as an empirical cue to explore the use and critique of the concept of ‘resistance’ within cultural criminology and subcultural theory. The paper problematizes commodification of resistance discourses as they apply to the rugged culture of the streets and indeed its supposed ‘oppositional’ character where disadvantaged urban youth clearly embody and practice the logic of neoliberalism. It furthermore suggests that certain critiques of cultural criminology go too far in denying any meaning to criminality and subcultural practice beyond consumer desire. Ultimately, the concept of ‘defiance’ is suggested as a useful tool to understand the norms of and behaviours of the excluded.

Taking pleasure seriously: the political significance of subcultural practice

ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates that subcultural theory continues to provide a relevant and useful analysis of youth leisure practices and their political significance in contemporary society. It achieves this by analysing the theoretical antecedents to both subcultural theory and the post-subcultural theory that followed it. It is argued that the post-subcultural turn to studying affects and everyday lives resonates deeply with the Gramscian perspective informing subcultural theory. It is thus possible to interpret post-subculturalism as augmenting rather than negating its predecessor. Deploying an analysis that combines these perspectives allows for an account of contemporary youth leisure practices that demonstrates a number of different forms of politics explicated within the paper: a politics of identity and becoming; a politics of defiance; a politics of affective solidarity and a politics of different experience. Whilst not articulated or necessarily conscious, there is a proto-politics to youth leisure that precludes it from being dismissed as entirely empty, hedonistic and consumerist. This paper demonstrates how the lens of post-subculturalism focuses on the affective spaces where this politics is most apparent and provides a means of updating subcultural theory to understand contemporary youth practices.

The commodification of compensation? personal injuries claims in an age of consumption

This article critiques the opprobrium attached to the phenomenon of tortious compensation seeking observable in those discourses which bemoan the existence of a ‘compensation culture’ (or ‘litigation crisis’). It draws on ethnographic interviews with professionals involved in advancing and defending against compensation claims to demonstrate how issues of consumerism and commercialism have shaped contemporary practice. Where participants locate a heightened claims-consciousness among the socially marginalized, it will be argued that debates on claims-making must be understood in light of consumerist desire and class-cultural judgement. Similarly, where claims resolution practices promote commercial expedience over just entitlement, it will be argued that populist concerns are fuelled by a distrust of abstract, hyper-capitalist modes of responding to personal injury. The ethnography sits within a frame that draws on late-modern social theory to locate both heightened levels of ‘litigiousness’ and its construction as somewhat ‘deviant’ within the same socio-economic conditions.

Scumbags! An ethnography of the interactions between street-based youth and police officers

ABSTRACT The interactions between young, disadvantaged, urban men and the rank-and-file officers who police them should be understood as layered structural, cultural and emotional phenomena. Using data from a multi-dimensional ethnographic project, this paper demonstrates that structural issues manifest in cultural scripts which place both groups in confrontation with each other. Within a tightly bound geographic district, competitiveness between them can be animated by intense emotionality. Frustration, humiliation, disdain and the potential for elation push both parties into behaviours that cannot be understood through discretion and confidence models of decision-making alone. Ultimately, through recognising how questions of inclusion/exclusion play out in simultaneously structural, cultural and emotive ways, the problems generated by negative interactions between the two groups might be meaningfully understood.