"Disorder and Despair: Beating in Winnipeg Street Gangs"

Wed. Nov. 27 12:30 PM - Wed. Nov. 27 01:30 PM
Contact: b.dobchuk-land@uwinnipeg.ca
Location: Room 1L13

The Department of Criminal Justice presents Dr. Kathleen Buddle of the University of Manitoba for her lecture entitled: On Disorder and Despair: Beating in Winnipeg Street Gangs.

Abstract:
Youth violent crime in Winnipeg disproportionately victimizes impoverished communities and poor and raced youth in particular. Tough on crime advocates, employing neoliberal biopolitical logic, often mobilize moral panic around “risk communities,” identifying threats who imperil the proper functioning of the market to support policies that would increase suppression efforts and incarceration rates. At the other end of the political spectrum are those who would deny youth any agency, suggesting that structural forces alone produce gangs and violence. They often assert that offending youth should be returned to the community where they are expected to become resilient, to manage their own disorderly lives, and to become properly aligned entrepreneurial citizens. In this paper, I am concerned with the new modes of precarity that are generated when an ailing social body is misdiagnosed as afflicted with “gang violence.” This talk seeks to illuminate the ways this logic of “improper circulation” contributes to risk, destabilizing the already precarious positionality of marginal subjects. It discusses how a policy infrastructure informed by the notion of circulatory disorder creates an invisible child-welfare-to-prison pathway.

Bio:
Dr. Buddle is an Associate Professor of Anthropology specializing in Applied, Media and Criminal Anthropologies at the University of Manitoba. Her research addresses Indigenous media activism in Canada; cultural performance and politics in the production of urban Indigenous localities; multi-generational Indigenous and Newcomer street gangs, the cultural production of prairie lawlessness; the disciplining of the bodies of criminal others; and the authorizing of new social categories by Indigenous women's organizations as they struggle to shift public debates about Indigenous families onto more productive terrain. She sits on numerous Boards for Community Based Organizations in Winnipeg wherein she provides research-informed, practice-based service.