Resisting and creating new voices
GangPedia is a TransGang Project special feature.
Gangpedia Space is an online space in which the main concepts related, used or linked to the world of youth street groups appear and are defined.
This website hosts content (video, music, writing) created by young gang members, researchers, and community. It seeks to be a collaborative space that puts the youth gang members, and young people, at a centre stage.
The TRANSGANG project will develop a renewed model for the analysis of transnational youth gangs in the global era, in dialogue with two classics of urban ethnography, published nearly a century ago: The Gang, by F.M. Thrasher (1926) and The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, by W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki (1918?1920). Traditionally, a youth gang has been typically understood as a small delinquent group of young men based in a locality. The focus has been on crime and violence. Where there has been acknowledgement of larger?sized gangs with a greater geographical range, the emphasis has still been primarily on violence and crime. Less attention has been paid to migration (rural, urban, transnational) and to the economies of gangs; that is, how members and local communities gain a variety of benefits. Youth gangs should be distinguished from organized crime or transnational criminal organisations, including terrorist cells. Manuel Castells (1996) argued over twenty years ago that the network society is ‘space of flows’, exemplified by online connectivity. The ‘affordances’ – potentials, opportunities ? of the internet are crucial to the contemporary social practices of youth, including the constitution of gangs. Moreover, gangs have specific cultural practices and creative outputs. These too require recognition. In short, we need new ways of talking about transnational youth gangs in the global era. This project sets out to fill the gap.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No742705).
