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Ronnie Lippens and Tony Kearon, eds.

In an age of transition, such as ours, the role of the imaginary in the production and reproduction of social order is becoming ever more important. In his The Time of the Tribes, the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli “the imaginary is increasingly granted a role in structuring society.” This issue aims to contribute to the ongoing debates on this issue. Section I examines how, on a macro level, changing and persisting imaginaries of empire structure, or at least delimit, the space within which processes of regulation, control, and repression take place. Particular attention is paid to emerging global neoliberal imaginaries and to traces of surviving colonialism and orientalism in the regulation and control of crime and terror. In Section II, the focus is on how, on a micro level, particular groups who find themselves enmeshed in conditions of rapid social and cultural transition, imagine communities, negotiate identity, and invent resistance. Contributions explore bourgeois identities, Colombian youth, migrants’ tactics and negotiations, and imaginary criminal identities. Finally, Section III examines how, on a meso or institutional level, imaginaries of regulation and control gradually emerge and how they seem to be structuring or delimiting regulatory policies and interventions. At the center of analysis are media images of otherness and exclusion, imaginaries of corporate and state control, and victim ideology.

Purchase articles (click on the author link to read the abstract and buy the pdf):

Ronnie Lippens and Tony Kearon, Introduction and Editorial Overview: Emerging Imaginaries of Regulation, Control, and Repression [Free Download]

Tony Kearon, We Have Never Been Liberal — Bourgeois Identity and the Criminal(ized) Other

Chris Greer and Yvonne Jewkes, Extremes of Otherness: Media Images of Social Exclusion

Simon Hallsworth, The Feminization of the Corporation, the Masculinization of the State

Mark Brown, ‘That Heavy Machine’: Reprising the Colonial Apparatus in 21st-Century Social Control

Farid Samir Benavides-Vanegas, From Santander to Camilo and Ché: Graffiti and Resistance in Contemporary Colombia

Shani D’Cruze, Negotiating Metropolitan Spaces and Identities: A Historian’s Reading of Tactics in 1920’s New York Homicide Trials

Maggie O’Neill, Philip A. Woods, and Mark Webster, New Arrivals: Participatory Action Research, Imagined Communities, and ‘Visions’ of Social Justice

Sandra Walklate, Imagining the Crime Victim: The Rhetoric of Victimhood as a Source of Oppression

Steve Hall, Simon Winlow, and Craig Ancrum, Radgies, Gangstas, and Mugs: Imaginary Criminal Identities in the Twilight of the Pseudo-Pacification Process

Jayne Mooney and Jock Young, Imagining Terrorism: Terrorism and Anti-Terrorism Terrorism, Two Ways of Doing Evil

Ronnie Lippens, Deep Structures of Empire: A Note on Imperial Machines and Bodies