Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance
The Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) is a University designated Centre of Research Excellence
Knowing the other
On 16 January 2012 the Guardian revealed that the new commissioner of the metropolitan police Bernard Hogan-Howe intends to make officers of operation trident the 'spearhead' of a new police campaign against street gangs. The newspaper reported, moreover, that Hogan-Howe 'has solid political backing' for his envisaged war on gangs, because it is entirely in line with the 'security fight-back' David Cameron has called for in his speech on the riots on 15 August 2011. Apart from the fact that precisely those officers will take the lead in the envisaged 'war on gangs', who ran the operation that led to the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last August, which triggered the riots in the first place, this strategy amounts – at least to my mind – to fighting fire with oil. For the 'war on gangs' will for sure implicate an increase in those 'stop-and-search' operations among marginalised youths, which convinced the latter that last August was the right time to 'violate [the police] just like they violate us'.
Yet, what interests us here is that the embraced policy response of more and better i.e. 'tougher' policing against youths is entirely reasonable within Cameron's framing of the riots as acts of 'pure criminality' devoid of any political meaning and the labelling of the rioters as 'thugs […] with a twisted moral code […and] a complete absence of self-restraint.' This points once more to the political significance of labels in policy discourse and media coverage: these labels carry with them specific forms of knowledge that help to establish particular regimes of truth, which in turn render certain policy responses reasonable while foreclosing others as inappropriate.
In the following blog posts (as well as during the forthcoming CCIG Forum 25) we therefore like you to discuss the following questions with us:
- What forms of knowledge about the riots and the rioters circulated?
- Who were they understood and imagined to be?
- What sorts of knowledge were authorised?
- What sorts of experts and expertise were summoned?
Forthcoming events
Recent blog posts
Monthly archive
- February 2012 (2)
- January 2012 (1)
- December 2010 (1)
- September 2010 (1)
- May 2010 (1)
- April 2010 (1)
- December 2009 (1)
- October 2009 (3)
- July 2009 (1)
- June 2009 (2)
1 comment
Jason Toynbee 2 February 2012, 16:30
Forms of knowledge about the riots? The dominant forms from the mainstream parties (in a range, say, from Lammy to Cameron) and right wing media were surely ideological in the sense of their being systematically misleading in the interests of power. As Stephen Scheel suggests such responses to the riots amount to fighting fire with oil. They misconceive the causes which were broadly to do with inequality, posing instead criminality abstracted from the realm of the social. If this seems obvious to (most of) us doing social research, the point I want to make is that such an analysis poses the question not just of *sorts* of knowledge and expertise but also the adequacy of the knowledge. We need to be able address its falseness with respect to what it is referring to. Don't we?