Criminalization Representation Regulation

This book draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality as a lens to analyze and critique how crime is understood, reproduced, and challenged.

This book draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality as a lens to analyze and critique how crime is understood, reproduced, and challenged.

What is a crime and how do we construct it? The answers to these questions are complex and entangled in a web of power relations that require us to think differently about processes of criminalization and regulation. This book draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality as a lens to analyze and critique how crime is understood, reproduced, and challenged. It explores the dynamic interplay between practices of representation, processes of criminalization, and the ways that these circulate to both reflect and constitute crime and "justice."

"By 2004, Ontario and British Columbia implemented "safe streets" legislation, laws that criminalize the economic activities, such as panhandling and squeegeeing, of people living in poverty. Concerned that Nova Scotia would do the same, the editors of this volume partnered with community groups to organize a public colloquium on the criminalization of poverty. Contributors to the colloquium from across Canada included a diversity of voices, from academics, policy makers and frontline workers to those affected first hand by these policies. This book, emerging from that conference, critically interrogates how state and private practices have increasingly come to over-regulate people with severely limited economic resources, and argues that the criminalization of our society's most vulnerable, the poor, women, the racialized, the disabled, youth, is materially and symbolically central to neoliberal politics and economics. The essays here also point to new ways of moving forward, approaches to poverty that minimize the use of law and regulation and have the potential to create a more compassionate future"--Back cover.

Emerging from a public colloquium on the criminalization of poverty, this volume critically interrogates how state and private practices have increasingly come to over-regulate people with severely limited economic resources, and understands this regulation as part of the dynamics of liberal capitalism. Exploring issues such as homelessness, social assistance and single mothers, and written from a diversity of perspectives from academics to frontline workers, policy-makers and those affected first hand by these practices, this book aims to help readers imagine a more compassionate future.

Globalization, Urbanization, and Civil Society is an interdisciplinary compilation of chapters concerning civil society in the global geopolitical context. The establishment of civil society is essential for urbanism and the global community because it is the sense and essence of development concerning what humankind is, as a collective entity on the globe. This thought-provoking book covers the multidimensional aspects, issues, challenges, and consequences of geopolitics and globalization on civil society, including freedom in the public sphere, alienation, neo-fascism, social cohesion, racial inequality, political narcissism, political-economic exceptionalism, Islamic radicalism, social justice, and resistance. The author brings a fresh and essentially non-Western critical perspective to bear on the fundamental challenges faced by civil society as a result of the globalization of corporate capitalism in the Digital Age, as well as providing a rich perspective on colonialism. This book will appeal to scholars and graduate students of geopolitics and globalization, global development, sociology, international relations, cultural studies, psychology, and philosophy, as well as practitioners and policymakers who are interested in interdisciplinary approaches in the field of global studies.

Canada’s criminal justice system reinforces dominant relations of power and further entrenches the country in its colonial past. Through the mechanisms of surveillance, segregation, and containment, the criminal justice system ensures that Indigenous peoples remain in a state of economic deprivation, social isolation, and political subjection. By examining the ways in which the Canadian justice system continues to sanction overtly discriminatory and racist practices, the authors in this collection demonstrate clearly how historical patterns of privilege and domination are extended and reinforced.

Gender Justice and the Law presents a collection of essays that examines how gender, as a category of identity, must continually be understood in relation to how structures of inequality define and shape its meaning. It asks how notions of “justice” shape gender identity and whether the legal justice system itself privileges notions of gender or is itself gendered. Shaped by politics and policy, Gender Justice essays contribute to understanding how theoretical practices of intersectionality relate to structures of inequality and relations formed as a result of their interaction. Given its theme, the collection’s essays examine theoretical practices of intersectional identity at the nexus of “gender and justice” that might also relate to issues of sexuality, race, class, age, and ability.