Making Trouble: Cultural Constructions of Crime, Deviance, and Control (Social Problems and Social Issues) [Hardcover]

Neil Websdale (Editor), Jeff Ferrell (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0202306178 | ISBN-13: 978-0202306179

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 392 pages
• Publisher: Aldine Transaction (May 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0202306178
• ISBN-13: 978-0202306179
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #315,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent collection of papers, April 25, 2000

By 

William G. Staples "Billy Boy" (Lawrence, Kansas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Making Trouble: Cultural Constructions of Crime, Deviance, and Control (Social Problems and Social Issues) (Hardcover)

To the delight of some and the utter horror and dismay of others, the field of ural studies has leeched its way into the remotest capillaries of academic life. Even criminology, a field that, with a few notable exceptions, had been all but abandoned to the path model technicians and the neo-Liberal "risk" managers, could not, it seems, check the seepage. With this volume, we see that there are at least some folks in the discipline who think that social constructions, language, the media, and popular ure actually matter with regard to issues of crime, deviance, and control. "Cultural criminology," the editors declare, is grounded in both "the frameworks of ural studies and postmodernism" as well as being "firmly rooted in sociological perspectives"(p.5). I must admit that I was skeptical that such a rubric could bridge the deep modernist/postmodernist divide, but found that after reading the opening pages, I was sufficiently intrigued by the prospect. Shrewdly, these editors see ural criminology as not trying to "synthesize or subsume" the more contentious variants of ural studies and postmodern theory as well as the "new" (now quite old) criminology of the 1970s, modernist interactionist sociology, and critical theory into some kind of amalgam, but rather seek to "...engage them in a critical, multifaceted exploration of ure, deviance, and crime. Linking these diverse intellectual dimensions is an overarching concern with the meaning of deviance, crime, and control" (p.16 emphasis mine). I found their arguments to be persuasive and compelling and learned quite a bit from their approach. This eclectic yet thematically-engaged agenda comes together in this collection of fourteen interesting papers as well outstanding introductory and concluding essays by the editors. Making Trouble is an excellent collection of papers that manages to bring a wide range of topics and approaches under the conceptually interesting umbrella of ural criminology. Anyone interested in some of the more provocative interdisciplinary takes on crime, deviance, and control will do well to consider this volume. I highly recommend it.