My interest explores Race, Youth, Gender and exclusion. My recent book Race, Recognition, and Retribution in Contemporary Youth Justice (the Intractability/Malleability Thesis) gives a socio-historic account of Black, British and Canadian youth’s contemporary high rates of punishment. The research historicizes race and racialization in contemporary youth justice. The work locates penalty beyond the penal estate, into racialized youth’s everyday lives. Penalty is more appropriately examined as constitutive of everyday cross institutional experiences. Following a Critical Race Theory logic, the racialization of punitiveness in contemporary YJ reflects continuities of racialized peoples’ historic exclusion from the benefits of modern, universal rights.

Youth, Race, Gender, Theories of Punishment, Stigma as Penalty, Cross Institutional Exclusion, Modernity, Urban Cultures, Historical Methods