by Jennifer Tilton

How do you tell the difference between a “good kid” and a “potential thug”? In Dangerous or Endangered?, Jennifer Tilton considers the ways in which children are increasingly viewed as dangerous and yet, simultaneously, as endangered and in need of protection by the state.
Tilton draws on three years of ethnographic research in Oakland, California, one of the nation’s most racially diverse cities, to examine how debates over the nature and needs of young people have fundamentally reshaped politics, transforming ideas of citizenship and the state in contemporary America. As parents and neighborhood activists have worked to save and discipline young people, they have often inadvertently reinforced privatized models of childhood and urban space, clearing the streets of children, who are encouraged to stay at home or in supervised after-school programs. Youth activists protest these attempts, demanding a right to the city and expanded rights of citizenship.
Dangerous or Endangered? pays careful attention to the intricate connections between fears of other people’s kids and fears for our own kids in order to explore the complex racial, class, and gender divides in contemporary American cities.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2010; 203p.

By Anthony Wayne IV Fontes

Everyday brutality in Guatemala City shocks and numbs a society that has suffered generations of war and bloodshed. Much of this violence is blamed on maras, gangs bearing transnational signs and symbols, that operate in prisons an poor urban communities. I will explore how the maras’ evolution in post-war Guatemala has made them what they are today: victim-perpetrators of massive and horrifying violence, useful targets of societal rage, pivotal figures in a politics of death reigning over post-war society. However, while maras and mareros play starring roles in this account of extreme peacetime violence, they are not the problem. They are a hyper-visible expression of a problem no one can name, a deafening scream, a smokescreen obscuring innumerable and diffuse sources of everyday brutality. The maras will be my entry-point into a world defined by mortal doubt, and my guides as I navigate the rumors, fantasies, fears, and trauma swirling about criminal violence in post-war Guatemala City.

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  The specter of violence has become so utterly entwined with the making of lived and symbolic landscapes that it cannot be extricated from the very fibers of everyday life. I will illuminate the myriad of spaces this violence infiltrates and reorders to expose the existential uncertainty haunting efforts to confront, contain, and overcome violence. In the process, I provide an alternative, intimate understanding of the violence and suffering for which maras speak, or are made to speak, and the ways this violence and suffering affects individual consciousness and communal life, orders urban space, and circulates in public discourse. Thus, I have arranged my arguments and stories in such a way as to capture the destabilizing psychological, affective, and visceral impact the conditions of extreme violation at work in post-war Guatemala City have on knowledge- and meaning-making. The veins of uncertainty fracturing this account are meant to rupture the pretense of knowing, and so break through into the treacherous and largely unmapped territory that is life lived in the shadow of constant violence.

Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley, 2015. 222p.

Edited by Jennifer Erin Salahub, Markus Gottsbacher and John de Boer

While cities often act as the engines of economic growth for developing countries, they are also frequently the site of growing violence, poverty, and inequality. Yet, social theory, largely developed and tested in the Global North, is often inadequate in tackling the realities of life in the dangerous parts of cities in the Global South. Drawing on the findings of an ambitious five- year, 15- project research programme, Social Theories of Urban Violence in the Global South offers a uniquely Southern perspective on the violence– poverty– inequalities dynamics in cities of the Global South. Through their research, urban violence experts based in low-and middle income countries demonstrate how “urban violence” means different things to different people in different places. While some researchers adopt or adapt existing theoretical and conceptual frameworks, others develop and test new theories, each interpreting and operationalizing the concept of urban violence in the particular context in which they work. In particular, the book highlights the links between urban violence, poverty, and inequalities based on income, class, gender, and other social cleavages. Providing important new perspectives from the Global South, this book will be of interest to policymakers, academics, and students with an interest in violence and exclusion in the cities of developing countries.

Abingdon, Oxon , UK; New York: Routledge, 2018. 244p.