Anarchist practices of direct action, decentralization, leaderless resistance, and mutual aid animate many forms of progressive activism that today percolate around the globe. For a new generation of ...activists, such practices are part of a more general anti-authoritarian reorientation to social life and social change. Here I suggest that this reorientation is worth exploring on its own terms, given that misunderstanding is all but assured if we try to make sense of it in the context of more conventional approaches. I argue in turn that street-level anarchist practices can productively reengage contemporary criminology with an increasingly uncertain world; attune criminology to the contested political dynamics of the present day; and help confront the precarious status of criminology and its practitioners.
Drift Ferrell, Jeff
2018., 20180316, 2018, 2018-09-20
eBook
“This book was written late in the North American night, with the rumbling thuds and booming train horns of the nearby rail yard echoing through my windows, reminding me of the train hoppers and ...gutter punks out there rolling through the darkness.” In Drift, Jeff Ferrell shows how dislocation and disorientation can become phenomena in their own right. Examining the history of drifting, he situates contemporary drift within today’s economic, legal, and cultural dynamics. He also highlights a distinctly North American form of drift—that of the train-hopping hobo—by tracing the hobo’s legal and political history and by detailing his own immersion in the world of contemporary train-hoppers. Along the way, Ferrell sheds light on the ephemeral intensity of drifting communities and explores the contested politics of drift: the strategies that legal authorities employ to control drifters in the interest of economic development, the social and spatial dislocations that these strategies ironically exacerbate, and the ways in which drifters create their own slippery forms of resistance. Ferrell concludes that drift constitutes a necessary subject of social inquiry and a way of revitalizing social inquiry itself, offering as it does new models for knowing and engaging with the contemporary world.
Empire of Scrounge Ferrell, Jeff
2006, 2005, 2005-12-01, 20060101, Volume:
22
eBook
“Patrolling the neighborhoods of central Fort Worth, sorting through trash piles, exploring dumpsters, scanning the streets and the gutters for items lost or discarded, I gathered the city's ...degraded bounty, then returned home to sort and catalogue the take.”
—From the Introduction
In December of 2001 Jeff Ferrell quit his job as tenured professor, moved back to his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, and, with a place to live but no real income, began an eight-month odyssey of essentially living off of the street. Empire of Scrounge tells the story of this unusual journey into the often illicit worlds of scrounging, recycling, and second-hand living. Existing as a dumpster diver and trash picker, Ferrell adopted a way of life that was both field research and free-form survival. Riding around on his scrounged BMX bicycle, Ferrell investigated the million-dollar mansions, working-class neighborhoods, middle class suburbs, industrial and commercial strips, and the large downtown area, where he found countless discarded treasures, from unopened presents and new clothes to scrap metal and even food.
Richly illustrated throughout, Empire of Scrounge is both a personal journey and a larger tale about the changing values of American society. Perhaps nowhere else do the fault lines of inequality get reflected so clearly than at the curbside trash can, where one person's garbage often becomes another's bounty. Throughout this engaging narrative, full of a colorful cast of characters, from the mansion living suburbanites to the junk haulers themselves, Ferrell makes a persuasive argument about the dangers of over-consumption. With landfills overflowing, today’s highly disposable culture produces more trash than ever before—and yet the urge to consume seems limitless.
In the end, while picking through the city's trash was often dirty and unpleasant work, unearthing other people's discards proved to be unquestionably illuminating. After all, what we throw away says more about us than what we keep.
In Defense of Resistance Ferrell, Jeff
Critical criminology (Richmond, B.C.),
09/2022, Volume:
30, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Resistance to unjust power and authority has long been the angry energy of everyday struggle, the defiant democratization of progressive social movements, and the motor force of progressive social ...change. As critical criminologists, then, our role is to defend the practice of resistance and to explore its radical potential. In doing so, we can usefully investigate emergent moments of resistance that transcend narrow notions of individual intentionality, and we can trace the intricate interplay between immediate acts of resistance and larger dynamics of social transformation. We can focus especially on forms of resistance that both reveal the operations of power and reverse those operations in the interest of social justice. Most importantly, we can move beyond the sort of faux-radical pessimism that denies the potential of contemporary resistance, and embrace instead a multitude of resistant possibilities.
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We occupy a world saturated with digital imagery, a world where the swarm of mediated images encourages us to amuse ourselves and police ourselves to death, and quickly. Moreover, these images ...regularly have as their content other images, with these recursive visual loops spiraling endlessly through various media platforms and mediated universes. What once we might have called 'postmodern' we now just call everyday life. And yet, I'd argue, this saturating digital image circulation isn't in fact the whole of everyday visual life, but only a part Of it, and more for some than for Others. Because of this, critical engagement with digital imagery as the defining dynamic Of contemporary social life risks ignoring these other venues of everyday visuality — venues shaped less by the digital than by the analog, less by circulation than by secrecy, by innovation than by photographic and filmic tradition. Worse, an exclusive focus on digital networks and digital imagery risks reifying the very phenomena we seek to problematize and deconstruct. For that matter, such a focus might even constitute a questionable sort of projection whereby we assume that our own privileged connectivity to the flow of digital imagery is shared by all who occupy the contemporary world.
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6.
Postcards from a pandemic Ferrell, Jeff
Crime, media, culture,
03/2021, Volume:
17, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
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Cultural criminology focuses on situational, subcultural, and mediated constructions of meaning around issues of crime and crime control. In this sense cultural criminology is designed for critical ...engagement with the politics of meaning, and for critical intervention into those politics. Yet the broader enterprise of critical criminology engages with the politics of meaning as well; in confronting the power relations of justice and injustice, critical criminologists of all sorts investigate the social and cultural processes by which situations are defined, groups are categorized, and human consequences are understood. The divergence between cultural criminology and other critical criminologies, then, may be defined less by meaning than by the degree of methodological militancy with which meaning is pursued. In any case, this shared concern with the politics of meaning suggests a number of innovations and interventions that cultural criminologists and other critical criminologists might explore.
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: The consumerist economies of the late modern city, in combination with contemporary models of urban policing, operate to close down the public spaces of social life. In response, social groups ...dedicated to democratic urbanism utilize anarchic tactics of “dis‐organization” and direct action to reopen public space and to revitalize it with unregulated activity. Complicating and animating these spatial conflicts is the issue of drift. On the one hand, consumerist economies and contemporary policing strategies exacerbate urban drift, spawning the very sorts of spatial transgression they seek to control. On the other hand, many of the progressive movements that battle for open space and alternative economic arrangements themselves embrace a culture of drift, and explore drift for its anarchic and progressive potential. In this context drift can usefully be investigated as an emergent form of epistemology, community, and spatial politics.
Resumo: O consumismo econômico nas cidades da modernidade tardia, juntamente com os modelos contemporâneos de policiamento urbano, operam no sentido de restringir os espaços públicos da vida social. Em reação, grupos sociais dedicados à democracia urbana utilizam táticas anarquistas de “des‐organização” e acao direta e focam sua ação na reabertura e na revitalização do espaço público através de atividades não reguladas. Complicando e animando estes conflitos espaciais é o assunto de “drift” ou a deslocalizacao e movimento constante do sujeito. De um lado, o consumismo econômico e as estratégias de policiamento contemporâneo exacerbam estas deslocalizacões urbanas, contribuindo para a difusão dos tipos de transgressão que procuram controlar. Por outro lado, muitos movimentos progressistas que lutam pela abertura do espaço e por alternativas econômicas abraçam uma cultura de deslocalizacao, explorando seu potencial anárquico e progressista. Neste contexto, a deslocalizacao pode ser explorada como formas emergentes de epistemologia, comunidade e políticas espaciais.
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9.
Cultural Criminology Ferrell, Jeff; Hayward, Keith J; Young, Jock
2015, 2015-05-20, 2015-06-27
eBook
Drawing on issues of representation, meaning and politics, this book has been updated to now include material on: green criminology; cultural criminology of the state; current global activism, ...political protest and social movements; and crime and consumerism, providing readers with a cutting-edge introduction to this fascinating area.
"This book was written late in the North American night, with the rumbling thuds and booming train horns of the nearby rail yard echoing through my windows, reminding me of the train hoppers and ...gutter punks out there rolling through the darkness." In Drift, Jeff Ferrell shows how dislocation and disorientation can become phenomena in their own right. Examining the history of drifting, he situates contemporary drift within today's economic, legal, and cultural dynamics. He also highlights a distinctly North American form of drift—that of the train-hopping hobo—by tracing the hobo's legal and political history and by detailing his own immersion in the world of contemporary train- hoppers. Along the way, Ferrell sheds light on the ephemeral intensity of drifting communities and explores the contested politics of drift: the strategies that legal authorities employ to control drifters in the interest of economic development, the social and spatial dislocations that these strategies ironically exacerbate, and the ways in which drifters create their own slippery forms of resistance. Ferrell concludes that drift constitutes a necessary subject of social inquiry and a way of revitalizing social inquiry itself, offering as it does new models for knowing and engaging with the contemporary world.
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