Gang Lives
Global Portraits from the Streets and Beyond
- Open Access
Gang Lives
Global Portraits from the Streets and Beyond
- Open Access
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Description
Through biographical investigations of gang members' life histories, this open access book illustrates the range of causes, motivations, and consequences associated with being a gang member.
Gangs are one of a small number of truly global social phenomena, present across time and space all over the world. Partly as a result of this ubiquity, gangs are inherently revealing social institutions, and can be connected to a range of fundamental human activities, such as the exercise of power, capital accumulation, socialization, identity formation, territorialization, or the articulation of gender relations, amongst others.
At the same time, however, gangs are also frequently associated with an almost pathological form of violence, generally represented as engaging in senseless forms of brutality, and gangsters are popular global scapegoats. Such representations make it all the more urgent to understand what it is that truly motivates individuals to become gang members, why they undergo particular trajectories, and what the long-term consequences of gang membership might be.
Through a comparison of thirteen life histories of gang members from twelve different countries around the world, this book offers a nuanced and sensitive overview of the global gang experience. Life histories are ideal lenses through which to explore these issues due to their ability to simultaneously reflect both the uniqueness and the embedded complexity of gang lives, but also their capacity to offer fundamentally relatable portraits that elicit empathy and humanize individuals.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council grant (no. 787935).
Table of Contents
1. Gangster, Brother, Prisoner, Son: Chepas and the Mara Salvatrucha in Guatemala (Anthony W. Fontes, American University, USA)
2. The Many Lives of Ram, the Petty Criminal: Migration, Love, and Adaptation across Indian Ganglands (Atreyee Sen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
3. Jennifer: The First Female Gang Leader in Honduras (Ellen Van Damme, KU Leuven, Belgium)
4. 'Obviously, I Do Not Deny it, Nor Will I Ever Deny it': An Individual History of the Barrio 18 Gang Between El Salvador and Italy (Paolo Grassi, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy)
5. Blood, Deportee, Dealer, Carer: The Life and Times of a Belizean Gang Member (Adam Baird, UNIDIR, Switzerland)
6. The Hustling Ethics of a Drugs Dealer in Mathare, Nairobi (Naomi Van Stapele, The Hague University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands)
7. The Second Act: An Oral History of Glasgow Gangs, 1969-2022 (Alistair Fraser and Angela Bartie, with Kate Wilson, Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Newcastle, UK)
8. The Life of Bryan in Nicaragua (José Luis Rocha, Universidad Rafael Landívar, Guatemala, and Universidad Centroamericana 'José Simeón Cañas', El Salvador)
9. The Life History of a Triad member in Hong Kong (Sharon Ingrid Kwok, Western Sydney University, Australia)
10. Sharif's Story: From Gang Member to Human Rights Worker in Bangladesh (Sally Atkinson-Sheppard, University of Westminster, UK)
11. The Prison and Post-prison Life of Antonio Fernández, a.k.a. 'King Tone' (David C. Brotherton, City University of New York, USA)
12. The Paper Poet: From crime to career in Sierra Leone (Kieran Mitton, King's College London, UK)
13. Sito: A Life Interrupted (Laurence Ralph, Princeton University, USA)
Afterword (Javier Auyero, University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Product details
| Published | Jul 09 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 304 |
| ISBN | 9781350525061 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Dimensions | 234 x 156 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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