The Paradox of Parkour: An Exploration of the Deviant-Leisure Nexus in Late-Capitalist Urban Space

The cultural lifestyle sport of parkour maintains an ambiguous position at the nexus between deviance and leisure. It conforms to consumer capitalism’s commodified norms of ‘cool individualism’, risk-taking, and the creation of ‘deviant’ identities, whilst remaining a spatially transgressive practice that is continuously excluded by the spatial guardians of the hyper-regulated city. Drawing upon ultra-realist criminological theory and a critical rethinking of leisure, consumerism and urban space, this thesis explains parkour’s ambiguous position by suggesting that there is a fundamental paradox at the heart of parkour’s spatial practice that is a product of late-capitalism’s own making. As Post-Fordist Western societies shifted toward a consumer-oriented economy, consumer capitalism had to stoke the desire for cool and alternative identities such as parkour that tapped into subjectivities increasingly oriented to socio-symbolic competition and individualistic distinction. Simultaneously, deindustrialised cities were regenerated through the commodified urban leisure economy, prompting a renewed reliance upon hyper-regulated urban spaces to harness and direct desire and identities and consumption into these commodified spatial contexts. Consequently, this thesis argues that the paradox of parkour is a dual-product of late-capitalism’s cultivation of subjectivities geared to the pursuit of unique and culturally relevant identities, and a consumer economy that is reliant upon the hyper-regulated specificity of central consumer spaces. Consequently, consumer capitalism is caught in the double-bind of simultaneously promoting parkour whilst attempting to prohibitively direct it into approved and commodified spatial contexts. This is a paradox that has been entirely neglected in the academic literature on parkour, due in large part to the fetishisation of parkour as a form of ‘resistance’. This thesis challenges this fundamental assumption, drawing upon 28-months of in-depth ethnography among a parkour community in the North East of England. It accesses the wider life-worlds of traceurs, following them not only through their illicit practice of parkour in the city, but through their attempts to ‘make it’ in the commodified and professional world of parkour, cultural lifestyle sports, and social media fame. It explores the desires and motivations at the heart of the traceurs’ practice and their attempts to preserve a sense of culturally-relevant identity while navigating the precarious waters of early adulthood in late-capitalism. Additionally, the thesis utilises walking interviews with security guards to supplement ethnographic observations around spatial governance, systemic spatial violence and the amoral economy of late-capitalist cities. As such, the thesis provides a critical rebuke to the romanticisation of parkour as a mode of proto-political resistance, and instead attempts to explain its ambiguous position in the deviant-leisure nexus through an in-depth analysis of urban change, consumer culture, and identity in late-capitalism

The Post-Covid Future of the Environmental Crisis Industry and its Implications for Green Criminology and Zemiology

Smith and Brisman (2020) have argued that our social and cultural orientation toward environmental crises is influenced by the existence of an ‘Environmental Crisis Industry’ (ECI hereafter) that favours environmental ‘solutions’ that are palatable to state corporate interests and the global consumer classes ahead of systemic change. This article, however, argues that the ECI is evolving in the context of political-economic and geopolitical changes that have emerged as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and is becoming increasingly focused on renewable energy and the shoring up supply and control over the minerals and natural resources crucial to the energy transition. These, however, are not without their own harms. While green criminology has spent a great deal of time considering the harms and consequences of failing to seriously tackle climate change, it has scarcely considered the potential harms that could emerge if the ECI decided to seriously pursue zero-carbon targets. As the ECI gets more serious, this article considers these potential harms and the implications this has for criminologists and zemiologists interested in climate change and environmental harm

Editorial

This editorial introduces readers to the most recent issue of JCCHE.&nbsp

Editorial: The Longest Year:The Future of Crime, Harm and Justice in the Shadow of 2020/2021

This editorial is an introduction to the first special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm and Ethics. The aim of this issue is to draw together a range of perspectives on 2020 as ‘the longest year’ and its implications for the future of crime, harm and justice. The collection of papers, essays and interviews incorporate empirical data, theoretical analysis, and speculative horizon-scanning to outline the current position and future directions for crime, harm and ethics

Gambling and harm in 24/7 capitalism: Reflections from the post-disciplinary present

Drawing upon original ethnographic data, this chapter explores how the growing influence of technology within the gambling industry has had a far greater impact than the mere expansion of participation and industry profit. Instead, it is argued that technological advances have facilitated broader shifts toward a ‘post-disciplinary’ culture of consumer capitalism that has altered the very nature of contemporary gambling practices. Contrary to dominant understandings of gambling as a spatially fixed and separate practice organised around excitement and drama, it is argued that contemporary gambling is a more spatially flexible and embedded daily practice that is geared toward low-stakes, perpetual, and accelerated repeat-play which carries an affective state characterised by an almost catatonic ‘depressive hedonia’. It is argued that such changes have generated a contemporary gambling milieu whose harms are arguably less spectacular and visible, but far more pervasive, insidious, and severe in their nature, demanding new conceptualisations which have dramatic implications for theory, policy-making, and media responses alike

Lifestyle gambling, indebtedness and anxiety: A deviant leisure perspective

While once subject to wide-ranging state control, gambling has successfully culturally embedded itself within the normalised and legitimised forms of leisure such as the night-time economy, sports fandom and online forums of socialisation. Consequently, this article argues that existing research which conceptualises gambling as separate from everyday life is largely obsolete in the contemporary context. We argue here that gambling has become an integral feature of the wider masculine weekend leisure experience, intimately connected to an infantilised consumer identity that is peculiar to late-capitalism. This article, drawing upon ongoing ethnographic research among what we term ‘lifestyle gamblers’, utilises a deviant leisure perspective to problematise the myriad harms that emerge from this relationship, situated within a broader critique of consumerism and global capitalism. While social gambling is defended fiercely by the industry, this article argues that an identity-based culture of sports-betting that attaches fragile social and cultural capital to the allure of the gambling win encourages the chasing of losses and impulsive betting. Underscored by a culture of readily available and high-interest credit, we explore how gamblers in a technologically accelerated culture develop a pathological relationship to money as it becomes desublimated and loses its symbolic value. Such processes, exacerbated by the promise of consumer culture, have the potential to cast these young adults into a paralysing reality of indebtedness that is fraught with depression, stress, domestic instability and destructive behaviours of consumption

Shopping with violence: Black Friday sales in the British context

This article argues that the 2014 adoption of the US shopping tradition of Black Friday sales to stores and supermarkets in the United Kingdom and beyond represents an important point of enquiry for the social sciences. We claim that the importation of the consumer event, along with the disorder and episodes of violence that accompany it, are indicative of the triumph of liberal capitalist consumer ideology while reflecting an embedded and cultivated form of insecurity and anxiety concomitant with the barbaric individualism, social envy and symbolic competition of consumer culture. Through observation and qualitative interviews, this article presents some initial analyses of the motivations and meanings attached to the conduct of those we begin to understand as ‘extreme shoppers’ and seeks to understand these behaviours against the context of the social harms associated with consumer culture