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Thug Criminology combines the urgent and as yet silenced voices of former gang/street-involved peoples turned academics, alongside their allies, in order to challenge and disrupt mainstream and academic knowledge about urban youth gangs specifically, and the "streets" more broadly.
The book questions how the "streets" – and the racialized and marginalized urban communities who inhabit them – are researched, taught, and subsequently politicized. It looks at who gets to produce such knowledge, who benefits from such knowledge, and whose voices are privileged within dominant academic and public policy discourses. Drawing on decolonizing methodologies, the book seeks to give voice to scholars with lived experience of a "street" or gang life. Adam Ellis, Olga Marques, and Anthony Gunter reclaim the terms thug and gang to reconstruct the narrative around street-involved youth, seeing them not as criminals but rather as survivors of historical oppression and trauma. Challenging the colonial structure of criminology and other disciplines that focus on street crime, Thug Criminology aims to disrupt and disentangle the knowledge that has been produced on gangs and urban violence.
Drawing in part on the lived experiences of contributors who have overcome a "street life," Thug Criminology seeks to challenge the traditional scholarship on gangs and their behaviours.
- Imprint: University of Toronto Press
- Published: June 2023
- Pages: 284
Adam Ellis is an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Waterloo and the founder of The Street Institute.
Olga Marques is an associate professor of criminology and justice at Ontario Tech University.
Anthony Gunter is a senior lecturer and programme lead for childhood and youth studies at The Open University.
"This provocative volume shatters the positivist paradigm that promotes ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ through a distant gaze. The insider researchers make a compelling case for how their experiences in jail, prison, stigmatized neighbourhoods, and poverty give them an intellectual edge in understanding why people join gangs and do crime. We have much to learn from scholars who have lived ‘the life.’"
Randol Contreras, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Riverside, and author of The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream
"This volume offers an authentic insight into the tensions and challenges of street lives merged with academic lives. It challenges criminological orthodoxies without compromise, but with richness, poignancy, and foresight. We are challenged to think about who the real quantitative and qualitative ‘thugs’ are in the knowledge production enterprise. This is an essential and righteous contribution."
Coretta Phillips, Professor of Criminology and Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, and author of The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Social Relations among Prisoners