GangstaLife: Fusing Urban Ethnography with Netnography in Gang Studies

Recent research on street-involved populations has documented their online presence and has highlighted the effects of their online presentations on their lives in the real world. Given the increasing conflation between the online and offline world, contemporary urban ethnographers should pay increased attention to their participants’ online presence and interactions. However, methodological training of this sort is still in its infancy stages and has not yet evolved to guide the growing number of researchers undertaking this form of research. This article draws from our experiences using social media in our urban ethnographies with criminally involved groups, to examine the benefits, risks, and challenges of drawing on social media in urban ethnography. It is intended to serve as a foundational piece that will hopefully ignite scholarly dialogue, debate, and methodological training relating to deploying social media in urban—and specifically—gang ethnography

Making sense of murder: The reality versus the realness of gang homicides in two contexts

Despite the proliferation of research examining gang violence, little is known about how gang members experience, make sense of, and respond to peer fatalities. Drawing from two ethnographies in the Netherlands and Canada, this paper interrogates how gang members experience their affiliates’ murder in different street milieus. We describe how gang members in both studies made sense of and navigated their affiliates’ murder(s) by conducting pseudo-homicide investigations, being hypervigilant, and attributing blameworthiness to the victim. We then demonstrate that while the Netherland’s milder street culture amplifies the significance of homicide, signals the authenticity of gang life, and reaffirms or tests group commitment, frequent and normalized gun violence in Canada has desensitized gang-involved men to murder, created a communal and perpetual state of insecurity, and eroded group cohesion. Lastly, we compare the ‘realness’ of gang homicide in The Hague with the ‘reality’ of lethal violence in Toronto, drawing attention to the importance of the ‘local’ in making sense of murder and contrasting participants’ narratives of interpretation