Glasgow gangs - Russian gangs
New research on how society works. Glaswegian and Russian gangs: Laurie Taylor explores their origins, organisation and meaning in two strikingly different cultures.
Glasgow & Russian gangs: Laurie Taylor explores their origins, organisation and meaning in two strikingly different cultures. He talks to Alistair Fraser, Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at the University of Glasgow, whose fieldwork with young Glaswegian men, demonstrates that gangland life is inextricably bound together with perceptions of masculinity and identity and the quest to find a place in the community. They're joined by Svetlana Stephenson, a Reader in Sociology at London Metropolitan University, who found that Russian gangs, which saw a spectacular rise in the post Soviet, market economy in the 1990s, are substantially incorporated into their communities, with bonds and identities that bridge the worlds of illegal enterprise and legal respectability.
Alistair Fraser was in the final shortlist of six for this year's BSA/Thinking Allowed Ethnography Award.
Producer: Jayne Egerton.
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RELATED LINKS
Svetlana Stephenson at London Metropolitan University
READING LIST
Alistair Fraser, Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City, (OUP, 2015)Svetlana Stephenson, Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power, (Cornell University Press, 2015)
Broadcasts
- Wed 18 May 201616:00BBC Radio 4
- Mon 23 May 201600:15BBC Radio 4
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New research on how society works




