Bourdieu on the Block: Punishment, Policing and the Street

Abstract

This essay introduces the Special Issue 'Bourdieu on the Block: Punishment, Policing and the Street'. Although Bourdieu wrote comparatively little on criminological matters, references to Bourdieu's work have in the last decade gathered into a steady stream. There is a sense in which criminology, though something of a late-adopter, may be beginning to undergo its own 'Bourdieusian moment'. Notably, several of the contributions to this emergent discussion have taken place in the pages of this journal. Our intention in bringing them together is to take stock of the 'field of reception' into which Bourdieu's concepts have entered. We have selected articles that directly engage with Bourdieu, either embracing the framework or criticizing it, in something more than a throwaway reference. As represented in the papers, there are at least three tributaries that have pooled to form what we might term a putative Bourdieusian criminology: punishment, policing and the street. In recognizing the mutually constitutive role of structure, culture and agency in the wellspring of social action, Bourdieu creates a vocabulary for a systematic sociology of crime and criminalisation that bears further development and debate. Taken together, we believe these papers demonstrate not only the important role that Bourdieu has played in criminological research but also the potential to expand further. In order to clarify and develop these approaches, we suggest two future directions for the development of a Bourdieusian criminology.