FSSH Associate Professor publishes new book - Thug Criminology: A Call to Action
Dr. Olga Marques, Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, recently published a new book entitled .
Published by University of Toronto Press, the book is edited by Dr. Marques, Dr. Adam Ellis from the University of Waterloo, and Dr. Anthony Gunter from Open University.
Thug Criminology combines the urgent and as yet silenced voices of former gang/street-involved individuals turned academics, alongside their allies, to challenge mainstream and academic knowledge about urban youth gangs specifically, and the ‘streets’ more broadly.
The book questions how the ‘streets’ – and the racialized and marginalized urban communities who inhabit them – are researched, taught, and subsequently politicized. It looks at who gets to produce such knowledge, who benefits from such knowledge, and whose voices are privileged within dominant academic and public policy discourses. Drawing on decolonizing methodologies, the book seeks to give voice to scholars with lived experience of a ‘street’ or gang life. Adam Ellis, Olga Marques, and Anthony Gunter reclaim the terms thug and gang to reconstruct the narrative around street-involved youth, seeing them not as criminals but rather as survivors of historical oppression and trauma.
