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- Convenors:
-
Katalin Parti
(Virginia Tech)
Matías Aravena Aravena Hinojosa (Catholic University of Chile)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how participatory action research challenges traditional academic narratives of crime and deviance, offering decolonial and activist perspectives that empower communities. By unwriting hegemonic narratives, we focus on collaboration in the co-construction of community resilience.
Long Abstract:
In a globalized era, local communities face complex crime and deviance challenges, such as human trafficking, cybercrime, radicalization, and security politics that privilege fear, surveillance, and suspicion. These transnational issues often erode social ties and cultural cohesion, making communities more vulnerable and tending towards individualization. This panel employs the concept of unwriting to question dominant academic paradigms about crime, insecurity, and the meanings of ‘the community’. We examine how participatory action research (PAR) and interdisciplinary collaborations can empower communities by re-centering situated knowledge, cultural practices, and storytelling as tools for resilience and creating new alternative narratives about crime, violence, and resistance.
By adopting a decolonial or activist lens, this panel confronts the unseen, unheard, and untold practices of community resistance in contexts of violence, crime and insecurity. We explore how unwriting – the undoing of established academic narratives – allows for a more inclusive and material engagement with communities affected by global crime. In doing so, we challenge the narratives imposed by surveillance, algorithmic control, and self-censorship, creating space for alternative, multi-sensual research practices.
The panel invites scholars to explore how PAR and collaboration facilitate unwriting by elevating community voices, particularly those traditionally marginalized. We seek to build a network of interdisciplinary researchers committed to rewriting the dominant scripts of crime and deviance through the lens of local knowledge, fostering empowerment and social healing. This approach reflects a conscious departure from hegemonic academic traditions, creating new possibilities for collaborative, community-driven research.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
Crime in Arab-Palestinian society in Israel evolved from colonial networks of collaborators established during the military regime era (1948-66). Over time, violent brokers transformed from state agents into criminal organizations while maintaining symbiotic relationships with the establishment.
Paper Abstract:
This paper traces the development and transformation of rising criminal violence in Arab-Palestinian society in Israel. Drawing on Anton Blok's analytic of “violent brokerage" it demonstrated how today's “organized crime” emerged from longer histories of colonial control and political intermediation. While dominant discourses frame rising crime rates as evidence of cultural pathology or of "state absence", community knowledge and historical analysis reveal how today's violent brokers grew out of networks of collaborators established during the military regime era (1948-1966). The military government's system of permits, informants, and selective resource distribution created enduring patterns of violent mediation between Palestinian communities and state power that continue to shape contemporary criminal governance.
This genealogical perspective reveals how colonial-era brokers – local leaders and clan heads recruited to gather intelligence and manage population control – evolved into contemporary criminal organizations. These intermediaries continue to operate in “regimes of permission”, using violence at their discretion. Over time, these brokers gained autonomy through integration into regional trade networks while maintaining symbiotic relationships with the Israeli establishment.
By examining the evolution of violent brokerage over time, this research challenges academic traditions that disconnect current patterns of crime from colonial histories. The analysis demonstrates how contemporary criminal violence reflects the transformation rather than absence of colonial strategies of rule, contributing to broader efforts to develop decolonial approaches to studying crime in Palestine/Israel and beyond.
Paper Short Abstract:
Traditional western criminological research approaches place researchers as experts within dominant academic paradigms, with limited power and agency granted to Indigenous communities. This presentation focuses on unwriting stereotypical narratives of crime and deviance using the research design process of ‘working backward.’ We use two Canadian arts-based projects grounded in relational accountability (Henry et al., 2016) to demonstrate how we materially engaged the community in the creation process, leading to increased empowerment, relational connection, and broader social healing.
Paper Abstract:
Western criminological research approaches employ standardized processes where the researcher identifies an issue, develops the hypothesis, constructs the research design, analyzes information, and reports on findings. This formulaic process positions researchers as the experts within dominant academic paradigms, with limited power granted to communities. This presentation focuses on the unwriting research design process of ‘working backward’ to provide Indigenous communities with the ability to create and direct the research process from conception to implementation. We discuss how ‘working backward’ in community-engaged arts-based research is a decolonial approach that inverts traditional western research processes to foster community empowerment and broader social healing. Using two Canadian arts-based projects grounded in relational accountability (Henry et al., 2016) as examples, we discuss how the ‘working backward’ process strengthened the research approach and sought to rewrite the stereotypical narratives of crime and deviance. One was a digital storytelling project with Indigenous ex-gang members; the other was a body mapping project that worked with Indigenous women who had been incarcerated in a cultural prison. Throughout, we describe how our relationships materially engaged the community in the creation process, which led to increased social connections where participants felt they got to give something back. During the process, participants expressed that this is how research must be done with the community and that they were now more open to partake in other research activities.
Paper Short Abstract:
In my talk I want to analyse difficulties of studying informal norms and social control mechanisms in Arctic communities. Moreover, I want to discuss why the state withdraws its right on the power monopoly on its territory. In my paper I want to highlight another side of the discussion in the panel or how the absence of the participatory research and applied projects helps the community to deal with crime.
Paper Abstract:
In 1973 a legal anthropologist Sally Falk Moore coined a term ‘semiautonomous social field’ that ‘can internally generate customs and symbols and has rule making capacities’. In this talk I focus on my studies in the Russian Arctic in remote indigenous communities. These were so-called lawless villages. The reality was opposite – such villages had very well regulated social control system. The problem was that their laws differed from the state laws and the the police officer was not present. The vacuum caused by absence of the law enforcement institutions was filled with traditional social norms and informal social control structures.
In my talk I want to analyse difficulties of studying these informal norms and social control mechanisms. Moreover, I want to discuss why the state withdraws its right on the power monopoly on its territory. In my paper I want to highlight another side of the discussion in the panel or how the absence of the participatory research and applied projects helps the community to deal with crime. In the final part of the talk I want to enlarge my scope and discuss how the decolonial movement of the Arctic indigenous people in Canada, USA and in Scandinavian states hinders outside research with the aim to help indigenous communities to solve their problems caused by drug use, crime and violence and how such policy helps indigenous communities to control crime and criminal behaviour of people through the legak recognition of the native semiautonomous social field.
Paper Short Abstract:
I present the theatre play ‘Barrio’ as an instance of interdisciplinary collaboration in the context of research on criminal insecurity. I discuss how the play was used to induce dialogue with participants of democratic coexistence, crime, and the longing for ‘community’.
Paper Abstract:
‘Barrio’ is a theatre play that was the product of an interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropology and theatre. Drawing on the findings of an ethnography of experiences of criminal insecurity in a context of rising criminal rates and violence, the play was used to induce dialogue between the research team, the actors, and the research participants, becoming a part of the research process and a direct intervention in the research context. Through the process of making and playing the theatre play, I explore how broader concerns and experiences over crime and microsegregation in urban neoliberal Chile became a part of interpretations enmeshed in a longing for dialogue and community. Drawing on these conversations over the possibility of dialogue and community, I discuss the role of interdisciplinary collaborations between social sciences and art to produce a space of dialogue and coexistence within difference. In this context, the play, its backstage, and the reactions of the public were together an opportunity for recognizing differences and, therefore, a space of collaboration as a pre-dialogic performance. At the same time, as a research team, this allowed us to see the limits, obstacles, and problems in the perceived ‘community’, the ‘lack’ of community, or its longing. I argue that this is part of a broader anxiety in Chile over the possibility of democratic coexistence in a context of high levels of violence and inequality.