The Gang and Beyond Interpreting Violent Street Worlds

The gang today is seen as Britain's public enemy number one. This book tackles this gangland thesis head-on and refutes it, questioning how we think about and interpret violent street worlds and how and why we need to think about them in very different ways, pushing the boundaries of critical enquiry and providing a range of new ways of looking at disturbing realities.

Through the novel use of authoethnography, the book contests the widely held thesis that urban gangs today represent a serious, novel and developing threat. In this guise, they have been blamed for causing the riots of 2011, most gun related crime, the sexual violation of women, and outbreaks of dangerous dogs. Hallsworth argues that when subject to critical scrutiny, there is always an excess to the violence blamed on gangs that is not gang related and explanations for problems blamed on gangs can be advanced without needing to evoke the gang as an explanatory factor. In light of this, the book considers how best we might understand the nature of violent street worlds without falling into the pitfalls of the discourse of gang talk, exploring questions such as 'How do we have a gang problem?' and 'How best do we avoid one?'

This book is provocative, polemical and theoretical and one that seeks to make a significant intervention into both gangs studies and studies of urban violence more generally, commanding significant social attention in the academy and beyond.

Simon Hallsworth is Professor of Sociology and Head of the School of Applied Social Sciences, University Campus Suffolk, UK. He has written extensively on punishment in modern society, the local politics of crime and community safety and more recently violent street worlds. His research interests include street violence, weapon use, and the development of the security state. His previous books include Street Robbery (2005) and The New Punitiveness: Issues Themes and Perspectives (2005).

Introduction
1. Welcome to Gangland UK
2. My Goodness How Things Have Changed Themes
PART I: GANGS, WEAPONS AND VIOLENCE
3. King Pins in the Illegal Drug Trade?
4. Gangs and Violence
5. Weapon Dogs and the Gang
6. Gangs and Sexual Violence
7. Urban Disorder
PART II: THE FISTS AND THE FURY: MY LIFE IN A SEA OF GANGS
8. In the Beginning
9. The Joys of Adolescence
10. Get Pissed, Destroy
11. Into the Eighties
PART III: DECIPHERING GANG TALK
12. Defining Gang Talk
13. Reading Gang Talk as a Language Game
14. Novelty
15. Proliferation
16. Corporatisation
17. Weaponisation
18. Penetration
19. Monsters
20. The Seduction of Gang Talk
21. Unforeseen Consequences
PART IV: MORAL PANIC AND INDUSTRY
22. Emergence
23. From Reality to Gang Talking Fantasy: Reflections on the Media Inventory
24. The Journey Back: Reshaping Reality in the Image of Gang Fantasies
25. The Industrial Logic of 'Gang' Production
PART V: ARBORIALISM AND RHIZOMATICS: A TREATISE
26. The Sedentary and the Nomadic
27. Arborialism
28. Rhizomatics
29. Back to the Street
30. Reading the Street as Rhizome
31. Rhizomatic Organisation
PART VI: BACK TO THE STREET
32. Beyond the Gang
33. Back to the Street
34. Instability, Trauma and Street Life
PART VII: CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES IN URBAN VIOLENCE
35. Street Violence in the Post War Period
36. A Question of Continuities
37. Discontinuities: on Neoliberalism and its Consequences
38. Conclusion: How to Have a Gang Problem and How Not To
39. How to Have a Gang Problem
40. Koyaanisqutsi
Bibliography
Notes