Thomas Raymen | Northumbria University (original) (raw)

Books by Thomas Raymen

Bristol University Press, 2024

The world has been bombarded in recent years with images of the luxurious lives and wealth of cor... more The world has been bombarded in recent years with images of the luxurious lives and wealth of corrupt oligarchs and kleptocrats, amassed at the expense of ordinary people. Such images exploit our feelings of injustice, are taken as indicative of moral decay, and inspire a desire to purge our economies of dirty money, objects, and people. But why do anti-corruption efforts routinely fail? What kind of world are they creating? Looking at luxury art, antiquities, superyachts, and populist politics, this book explores the connection between luxury and corruption, and offers an alternative to the received wisdom of how we tackle corruption.

Routledge

Drawing on a novel blend of moral philosophy, social science, psychoanalytic theory and continent... more Drawing on a novel blend of moral philosophy, social science, psychoanalytic theory and continental philosophy, this book offers up a diagnosis of contemporary liberal capitalist society and the increasingly febrile culture we occupy when it comes to matters of harm. On what basis can we say that something is harmful? How are we supposed to judge between competing opinions on the harmfulness of a particular behaviour, practice, or industry? Can we avoid drifting off into relativism when it comes to judgements about harm? In an age of deep cultural and political discord about what is and is not harmful, providing answers to such questions is more important than ever.

Appraising the current state of the concept of social harm in academic scholarship and every-day life, Thomas Raymen finds a concept in an underdeveloped state of disorder, trapped in interminable deadlocks and shrill disagreements about what should and should not be considered harmful. To explain the genesis of this conceptual crisis and identify what we need to do to resolve it, The Enigma of Social Harm travels from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the present day, exploring trends and developments in moral and political philosophy, religion, law, political economy, and culture. Along the way, we see how such trends and developments have not only made it more difficult to establish a shared basis for evaluating harm, but that the tools which might enable us to do so are now outright prohibited by the political-economic, cultural, and ethical ideology of liberalism that dominates contemporary society.

Written in a clear and accessible style, it is essential reading for all those interested in matters of social harm, justice, politics, and ethics.

Taking us on an ethnographic journey into the spatially transgressive practice of parkour and fre... more Taking us on an ethnographic journey into the spatially transgressive practice of parkour and freerunning, Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City attempts to explain and untangle some of the contradictions that surround this popular lifestyle sport and its exclusion from our hyper-regulated cities. While the existing criminological wisdom suggests that these practices are a form of politicised resistance, this book positions parkour and freerunning as hyper-conformist to the underlying values of consumer capitalism and explains how late-capitalism has created a contradiction for itself in which it must stoke desire for these lifestyle practices whilst also excluding their free practice from central urban spaces. Drawing on the emergent deviant leisure perspective, Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City takes us into the life-worlds of young people who are attempting to navigate the challenges and anxieties of early adulthood. For the young people in this study, consumer capitalism’s commodification of rebellious iconography offered unique identities of ‘cool individualism’ and opportunities for flexibilised employment; while the post-industrial ‘creative city’ attempted to harness parkour’s practice, prohibitively if necessary, into approved spatial contexts under the buzzwords of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’. Therefore, Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City offers a vital contribution to the criminological literature on spatial transgression, and in doing so, engages in a critical reappraisal of the evolution of the relationships between work, leisure, identity and urban space in consumer capitalism.

Articles by Thomas Raymen

Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm, and Ethics, 2022

In this issue's conversation piece, Professor Simon Winlow sat down to talk with Dr Thomas Raymen... more In this issue's conversation piece, Professor Simon Winlow sat down to talk with Dr Thomas Raymen about his forthcoming book, The Enigma of Social Harm: The Problem of Liberalism (Routledge, 2022). For a number of years now, Raymen has been writing about the harms that emerge at the intersection of commodified leisure and consumer culture, and like many others operating in the border zones between criminology and zemiology, social harm has served as the conceptual foundations to this body of work. But in his forthcoming book, Raymen begins to question and challenge the stability of these conceptual foundations. On what basis can we say that something is harmful? How are we supposed to judge between competing opinions on the harmfulness of a particular behaviour, practice, or industry? Can we avoid drifting off into relativism when it comes to judgements about harm?

Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm, and Ethics, 2021

Smith and Brisman (2021) have argued that our social and cultural orientation toward environmenta... more Smith and Brisman (2021) have argued that our social and cultural orientation toward environmental crises is influenced by the existence of an ‘Environmental Crisis Industry’ (ECI hereafter) that favours environmental ‘solutions’ that are palatable to state corporate interests and the global consumer classes ahead of systemic change. This article, however, argues that the ECI is evolving in the context of political-economic and geopolitical changes that have emerged as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and is becoming increasingly focused on renewable energy and the shoring up supply and control over the minerals and natural resources crucial to the energy transition. These, however, are not without their own harms. While green criminology has spent a great deal of time considering the harms and consequences of failing to seriously tackle climate change, it has scarcely considered the potential harms that could emerge if the ECI decided to seriously pursue zero-carbon targets. As the ECI gets more serious, this article considers these potential harms and the implications this has for criminologists and zemiologists interested in climate change and environmental harm.

Critical Criminology, 2019

This article argues that the time has arrived for leisure and consumerism to become key objects o... more This article argues that the time has arrived for leisure and consumerism to become key objects of study for a 21st century critical criminology. As global capitalism struggles to sustain itself it is creating myriad crises in areas such as employment, personal debt, mental health issues and climate change. Using a zemiological lens, we argue that it is on the field of commodified leisure and consumerism that criminologists can see these meta-crises of liberal capitalism unfold. Therefore, this article positions the burgeoning deviant leisure perspective as a new and distinct form of 21st century critical criminology that departs from traditional criminological approaches to leisure rooted in the sociology of deviance in favour of critical criminology’s recent zemiological turn to social harm. In doing so, this article outlines how the deviant leisure perspective’s emergence at the intersection of zemiology, green criminology and ultra-realist criminological theory enables it to address some of the realities of our times, and begin to explain the normalised harms that emanate from the relationship between commodified leisure and consumer capitalism.

Justice, Power, and Resistance: The Journal of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, 2019

Social harm is one of the most potent and potentially transformative concepts currently available... more Social harm is one of the most potent and potentially transformative concepts currently available to the social sciences. However, scholars have struggled with how to define social harm, puzzled by enigmatic questions and tensions around how to establish clear conceptual parameters which take advantage of social harm's broader critical focus, whilst avoiding the concept from becoming too nebulous that it loses all utility. This article suggests that the enigma of social harm is symptomatic of far deeper social problems. Namely, liberalism's individualism has combined with postmodernism's cynicism to dismantle belief in any authority or ethics that can transcend the sovereign desires of the individual. This article argues that by revisiting the philosophy of Alasdair Macintyre and Slavoj Žižek, we can shake-off liberal postmodernism's 'culture of emotivism' and ethical maxims to develop a transformative theory of the Good and human flourishing from which we can derive an understanding of social harm.

The British Journal of Criminology

Situational crime prevention and CPTED strategies have been broadly criticised within much of the... more Situational crime prevention and CPTED strategies have been broadly criticised within much of theoretical criminology. Most of these criticisms dismantle the notion of the fully rational criminal actor, questioning the shaky ground of classical criminology on which its claims are made. Through positioning hyper-regulated city centres as post-social, post-political ‘non-places’ of consumption, this article builds upon these critiques arguing that attempts to ‘design out crime’ create environments which are not only doomed to fail in their primary objective, but actively create environments which perpetuate and exacerbate the decline in symbolic efficiency and the narcissistic, competitive-individualist and asocial subjectivities which, as recent work from left-wing criminology consistently reveals, have the capacity to significantly contribute to forms of harm, crime and deviance.

This article argues that the 2014 adoption of the US shopping tradition of Black Friday sales to ... more This article argues that the 2014 adoption of the US shopping tradition of Black Friday sales to stores and supermarkets in the United Kingdom and beyond represents an important point of enquiry for the social sciences. We claim that the importation of the consumer event, along with the disorder and episodes of violence that accompany it, are indicative of the triumph of liberal capitalist consumer ideology while reflecting an embedded and cultivated form of insecurity and anxiety concomitant with the barbaric individualism, social envy and symbolic competition of consumer culture. Through observation and qualitative interviews, this article presents some initial analyses of the motivations and meanings attached to the conduct of those we begin to understand as 'extreme shoppers' and seeks to understand these behaviours against the context of the social harms associated with consumer culture.

Based upon original ethnographic and interview data, this article presents an initial theorizatio... more Based upon original ethnographic and interview data, this article presents an initial theorization and analysis of the violence and disorder witnessed throughout UK high streets and superstores during the 2014 Black Friday sales. While the conduct of these 'extreme shoppers' appeared deviant , this article positions such behaviour as hyper-conformity to the cultural values of neoliber-alism, embodying the competitive individualism, cultivation of envy and aggressive display of consumer items which characterizes Western society in late modernity. In doing so, the authors explore the concept of 'deviant leisure', using the disorder of Black Friday to pose important questions about how the underpinning social and cultural values of neoliberal consumer capitalism pervades relatively mundane leisure activities, cultivating harmful subjectivities.

This article explains why an understanding of deviant leisure is significant for criminology. Thr... more This article explains why an understanding of deviant leisure is significant for criminology. Through reorienting our understanding of 'deviance' from a contravention of norms and values to encompassing engagement in behavior and actions that contravene a moral 'duty to the other', the new 'deviant leisure' perspective outlined here, describes activities that through their adherence to cultural values inscribed by consumer capitalism, have the potential to result in harm. Using the ideological primacy of consumer capitalism as a point of departure, we explore the potential for harm that lies beneath the surface of even the most embedded and culturally accepted forms of leisure. Such an explanation requires a reading that brings into focus the subjective, socially corrosive, environmental and embedded harms that arise as a result of the commodification of leisure. In this way, this article aims to act as a conceptual foundation for diverse yet coherent research into deviant leisure.

This article provides an ultra-realist analysis of AMC's The Walking Dead as a form of 'popular c... more This article provides an ultra-realist analysis of AMC's The Walking Dead as a form of 'popular criminology'. It is argued here that dystopian fiction such as The Walking Dead offers an opportunity for a popular criminology to address what criminologists have described as our discipline's aetiological crisis in theorizing harmful and violent subjectivities. The social relations, conditions and subjectivities displayed in dystopian fiction are in fact an exacerbation or extrapolation of our present norms, values and subjectivities, rather than a departure from them, and there are numerous real-world criminological parallels depicted within The Walking Dead's postapocalyptic world. As such, the show possesses a hard kernel of Truth that is of significant utility in progressing criminological theories of violence and harmful subjectivity. The article therefore explores the ideological function of dystopian fiction as the fetishistic disavowal of the dark underbelly of liberal capitalism; and views the show as an example of the ultra-realist concepts of special liberty, the criminal undertaker and the pseudopacification process in action. In drawing on these cutting-edge criminological theories, it is argued that we can use criminological analyses of popular culture to provide incisive insights into the real-world relationship between violence and capitalism, and its proliferation of harmful subjectivities.

While once subject to wide-ranging state control, gambling has successfully culturally embedded i... more While once subject to wide-ranging state control, gambling has successfully culturally embedded itself within the normalised and legitimised forms of leisure such as the night-time economy, sports fandom, and online forums of socialisation. Consequently, this article argues that existing research which conceptualises gambling as separate from everyday life is largely obsolete in the contemporary context. We argue here that gambling has become an integral feature of the wider masculine weekend leisure experience, intimately connected to an infantilised consumer identity that is peculiar to late-capitalism. This article, drawing upon on-going ethnographic research among what we term ‘lifestyle gamblers’, utilises a deviant leisure perspective to problematize the myriad harms that emerge from this relationship, situated within a broader critique of consumerism and global capitalism. While social gambling is defended fiercely by the industry, this article argues that an identity-based culture of sports betting that attaches fragile social and cultural capital to the allure of the gambling win encourages the chasing of losses and impulsive betting. Underscored by a culture of readily available and high-interest credit, we explore how gamblers in a technologically accelerated culture develop a pathological relationship to money as it becomes desublimated and loses its symbolic value. Such processes, exacerbated by the promise of consumer culture have the potential to cast these young adults into a paralysing reality of indebtedness that is fraught with depression, stress, domestic instability and destructive behaviours of consumption.

Book Chapters by Thomas Raymen

Compliance, Defiance, and 'Dirty' Luxury: New Perspectives on Anti-Corruption in Elite Contexts, 2024

Whenever a political or financial scandal emerges, it seems to confirm the widespread sentiment t... more Whenever a political or financial scandal emerges, it seems to confirm the widespread sentiment that what we are most lacking in our major political, economic and cultural institutions are individuals and organisations who exhibit genuine virtue, integrity, and a deep fidelity to the larger social and moral purpose of their particular profession, office, or social practice. We seem to yearn for the return of such figures. Yet today, the compliance regimes that are employed to combat corruption, fraud, money laundering and other crimes seem to be increasingly techno-bureaucratic in nature, lacking in meaningful moral content, and disinterested in and incapable of cultivating a genuine moral culture. This chapter investigates why this is the case, but it does so by suggesting that compliance regimes are actually a reflection of, rather than a departure from, our dominant moral and cultural conception of ethics.

50 Dark Destinations: Crime and Contemporary Tourism, 2023

In 2016, I, along with other members of the Deviant Leisure Research Network, attended the Americ... more In 2016, I, along with other members of the Deviant Leisure Research Network, attended the American Society of Criminology Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. During our time in New Orleans, there were certainly plenty of 'dark tourism' experiences and observations that were of interest to a band of critical criminologists interested in crime, harm, and commodified leisure. There were the obvious seductions and temptations of Bourbon Street and the French Quarter, in which many of us enthusiastically immersed ourselves. We toured around the fascinating and eerie 'Museum of Death' and observed racial abuse and sexual harassment associated with the tradition of 'flashing' in exchange for Mardi Gras beads (Redmon, 2015). If you drifted just a few blocks outside of the traditional tourist locations, the scars of hurricane Katrina were still visible. Plots where properties destroyed by the hurricane once stood remained empty, while others that were damaged stood derelict and unrepaired. In many ways, it was the ideal location for a criminology conference interested in crime, deviance, inequality, and harm.

The Palgrave Handbook of Social Harm, 2021

Criminological interest in the concept of social harm has exploded over the past two decades and ... more Criminological interest in the concept of social harm has exploded over the past two decades and rightly so. Social harm’s broader critical analytical lens brings the most pressing and systemic issues facing humanity into criminology’s purview, thereby broadening criminology’s horizons while simultaneously extending our discipline’s wider import beyond crime and the criminal justice system. While these are maintained to be positive developments for the discipline, this chapter critically appraises the state of the concept of social harm. While frequently used in both academia and everyday life, the chapter argues that as it stands, the concept of social harm is not as healthy as it might seem. On the contrary, social harm is argued to be in a conceptually underdeveloped state of practical and philosophical disorder. This disorder is located in failures to properly comprehend the nature of the concept of social harm; the political and moral philosophy of liberalism; and associated trends of postmodern cynicism. Finally, the chapter explores how this disorder has allowed the perpetuation of liberal capitalism’s assumption of harmlessness; a vital ideological process which facilitates the continuation and disavowal of liberal capitalism’s most severe political, socio-cultural, economic and environmental harms.

Crime, Harm and Consumerism, 2019

Bristol University Press, 2024

Routledge

Written in a clear and accessible style, it is essential reading for all those interested in matters of social harm, justice, politics, and ethics.

Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm, and Ethics, 2022

Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm, and Ethics, 2021

Critical Criminology, 2019

Justice, Power, and Resistance: The Journal of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, 2019

The British Journal of Criminology

Compliance, Defiance, and 'Dirty' Luxury: New Perspectives on Anti-Corruption in Elite Contexts, 2024

50 Dark Destinations: Crime and Contemporary Tourism, 2023

The Palgrave Handbook of Social Harm, 2021

Crime, Harm and Consumerism, 2019

This chapter outlines the intellectual origins and theoretical foundations of the burgeoning devi... more This chapter outlines the intellectual origins and theoretical foundations of the burgeoning deviant leisure perspective in criminology. It first problematises and challenges some of the central tenets of leisure as it has been approached by liberal social scientists; before going on to draw upon ultra-realist criminology theory to invite new perspectives and leisure and harm in contemporary consumer capitalism.

A Call for Papers for a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm, and Ethics.

By chance rather than design, we launched the first issue of JCCHE in the midst of a global pande... more By chance rather than design, we launched the first issue of JCCHE in the midst of a global pandemic and unprecedented lockdowns which were generating all manner of economic, environmental, technological, and ethical issues for governments, policymakers, criminal justice agencies and, of course, the general public. Therefore, when preparing our first call for papers, the theme of 'The Longest Year' seemed to fall into our laps.

This is the inaugural call for papers for the open-access Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm and... more This is the inaugural call for papers for the open-access Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm and Ethics:

Scholars have often coined terms to convey the significance of a natural historical period rather than a simple calendar definition of time. Historians have spoken of the ‘long nineteenth century’ and the ‘short twentieth century’ of 1914-1991, both of which bore witness to events of such significance in the realms of war, global politics, political economy, political philosophy, and cultural and technological change that it came to redefine their respective eras and set the world on a new historical course (Hobsbawm, 1994).

Therefore, it might be fitting to describe 2020 as ‘the longest year’. At the time of writing in January 2021, many of the past year’s features look set to linger with us into the future, with some of the myriad criminological and zemiological reverberations likely to be felt for decades to come. Therefore, this special issue invites criminological, zemiological, and interdisciplinary contributions that not only look back on the significance of 2020 but look forward to scan the horizon of what lies in the future for crime, harm, and justice in the shadow of the long year of 2020, and what intellectual tools we will need to keep track and make sense of them.

Trends in Organized Crime

Written with meticulous detail, Fake Meds Online: The Internet and the Transnational Market in Il... more Written with meticulous detail, Fake Meds Online: The Internet and the Transnational Market in Illicit Pharmaceuticals takes the reader upon an ethnographic journey into the shadowy and extremely complex world of the global online market in illicit pharmaceuticals. While the best ethnographies begin with rich qualitative descriptions of social life, the worst simply end there; and the authors of this research monograph engage in the true spirit of the ethnographic method by deriving general trends about contemporary society from the particular milieu of these online and offline illicit markets. This is perhaps the most commendable feature of the book. Through a mixture of online and offline ethnographic methods, Hall and Antonopoulos' acute empirical focus on the online market in illicit pharmaceuticals combines with more critical reflections on the political-economic and cultural conditions of late-capitalism to develop more broad-sweeping theoretical insights into the nexus between the global political-economic processes of neoliberalism and the cultural transformation of consumer-patient subjectivities. The result is a work of scholarly erudition that, on every level, is an exemplar of critical criminological research with a truly 21st century flavour; and its findings and analysis carry a criminological significance that extends far beyond this specific topic area.

This article argues that the 2014 adoption of the US shopping tradition of Black Friday sales to ... more This article argues that the 2014 adoption of the US shopping tradition of Black Friday sales to stores and supermarkets in the United Kingdom and beyond represents an important point of enquiry for the social sciences. We claim that the importation of the consumer event, along with the disorder and episodes of violence that accompany it, are indicative of the triumph of liberal capitalist consumer ideology while reflecting an embedded and cultivated form of insecurity and anxiety concomitant with the barbaric individualism, social envy and symbolic competition of consumer culture. Through
observation and qualitative interviews, this article presents some initial analyses of the motivations and meanings attached to the conduct of those we begin to understand as ‘extreme shoppers’ and seeks to understand these behaviours against the context of the social harms associated with consumer culture.

In a recent article published in this journal, Wood et al. attempt to undermine and cynically dis... more In a recent article published in this journal, Wood et al. attempt to undermine and cynically dismiss criminology’s rapidly developing ultra-realist perspective. Their article is littered with stark mischaracterisations, basic categorical errors and gaping omissions of concepts and texts which have been central to ultra-realism’s theoretical framework. More problematically, they offer no alternative theoretical framework that might better help contemporary criminology come to terms with evolving forms of crime and harm. Instead, they implicitly implore readers to return to the established theoretical and philosophical frameworks that constitute the liberal canon. This article identifies and rectifies Wood et al’s errors and omissions, clarifying ultra-realism’s theoretical position in the hope of encouraging a respectful and inclusive debate about how to advance criminological theory from its present position; one that is free from dogma and cynical non-belief, and open to all social scientists regardless of their personal views or political preferences.

The famous quotation attributed to Lenin states that "there are decades when nothing happens; and... more The famous quotation attributed to Lenin states that "there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." Like many other famous quotes, it is perhaps tired and overused. But we are happy to wear it out a little more, for it nevertheless serves as a useful departure point for this introduction and for the collection of papers in this first issue of the Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm and Ethics. We tend to periodize history and attach significance to the way in which eras become defined. Hobsbawm (1994) characterised the period between 1914-1991 as the "short twentieth century"-one characterised by world wars, global politics, political economy, cultural and technological change; it bore little resemblance to the preceding period and collapsed in the aftermath of the end of the cold war. In the wider expanse of history, 2020-2021 represents little more than a few short weeks. But the significance of those weeks may shape the decades to come in ways that mark a radical departure from the world we knew before any of us had heard of Covid-19. There have been numerous years of significance in recent times: the 2008 financial crisis; the 2011 uprisings, protests, and rebellions; the political significance of 2016. However, the global coronavirus pandemic-among other events-set 2020-2021 apart as a period of extraordinary significance. As such, it may be useful to consider 2020-2021 as "the longest year".

This chapter provides an overview and introduction to the book’s theoretical framework which is r... more This chapter provides an overview and introduction to the book’s theoretical framework which is rooted in ultra-realist criminology theory and transcendental materialism’s innovative conceptualisation of subjectivity. The chapter outlines both of these perspectives and how they differ from existing criminological theory in order to explore both how and why individuals in contemporary society are so committed to the values, symbols and identities of consumer capitalism. The chapter then employs this theoretical framework to problematise and deconstruct the dominant conceptualisation of parkour as a mode of performative resistance, by drawing upon theoretical ideas such as precorporation, the reversal of ideology and interpassivity.

This is to certify that I am responsible for the work submitted in this thesis, that the original... more This is to certify that I am responsible for the work submitted in this thesis, that the original work is my own, and that neither the thesis nor the original work therein has been submitted to this or any other institution for a higher degree.

Routledge eBooks, Nov 4, 2022

This chapter offers a theoretical appraisal of our contemporary hyper-regulated urban spaces situ... more This chapter offers a theoretical appraisal of our contemporary hyper-regulated urban spaces situated against a backdrop of deindustrialisation, the shift to consumer economies and the rise of the creative city paradigm. While existing work has characterised urban space as dead and asocial spaces bereft of life. This chapter opts to think our city centres as ‘Zombie Cities’: cities which have been eviscerated the social but are forced to wear the exterior signs of life through the injection of economically productive but artificial modes of culture and creativity. This sets the stage for explaining why parkour is inconsistently included and excluded from urban space, and how it attains spatio-economically contingent legitimacy and inclusion into urban space that problematises existing theoretical perspectives around a revanchist urbanism.

Trends in Organized Crime, Nov 15, 2018

This ethnographic chapter takes the reader into the wider lifeworlds of the ethnographic particip... more This ethnographic chapter takes the reader into the wider lifeworlds of the ethnographic participants of this study and their entrepreneurial efforts to make a living from the increasingly commodified and sportified world of lifestyle sports. It contextualises this trend within the challenges, barriers and anxieties that surround youth transitions into adulthood in late-capitalism; the increasingly blurred line between work and leisure and the rise of ‘prosumption’ and its impact upon modes of capital accumulation.

This chapter uses ethnographic data to explore the embodied aspects of parkour’s practice and how... more This chapter uses ethnographic data to explore the embodied aspects of parkour’s practice and how traceurs move around and navigate the city. It draws upon a blend of non-representational theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain the attraction to parkour’s intensely embodied, effective and risk-taking practice. It then looks at how the traceurs exist in the interstices of hyper-regulated urban spaces and develop an alternative cartography of the city, which is generated from their situated knowledge and the temporal rhythms and flows in the city centre’s consumer economy. It is argued that this alternative cartography constitutes a spatio-bodily transgression that violates the hyper-regulated city’s command for its subjects to be passive bodies who accept the dominant cartography of the city geared towards consumption.

This chapter outlines the book’s rationale and approach in addition to its general argument. It i... more This chapter outlines the book’s rationale and approach in addition to its general argument. It introduces the reader to what the author has described as a ‘paradox’ of parkour, whereby parkour and freerunning is hyper-conformist to the values of consumer capitalism whilst its free practice is excluded and marginalised from urban space. Before offering methodological commentary on the book’s ethnographic approach and outlining the structure of the book, it looks how this paradox is a product of late-capitalism’s own making – making reference to processes of deindustrialisation, neoliberalism and the rise of consumer capitalism.

Routledge eBooks, Sep 6, 2022

This chapter brings the book to a close by summarising the overall argument and looking to the fu... more This chapter brings the book to a close by summarising the overall argument and looking to the future of commodified lifestyle sports and post-industrial cities under an ailing capitalist economy. Most importantly, it calls upon academics to abandon concepts of resistance and social scientific approaches rooted in symbolic interactionism and discursive meanings in order to return to a critical analysis of the real generative mechanisms of political economy. This chapter closes with a brief epilogue that returns to the traceurs and the parkour community in this study one year after the ethnographic fieldwork ended.

Policy Press eBooks, Mar 14, 2023

Routledge eBooks, Sep 6, 2022

Springer eBooks, 2019

, parkour was formally recognised as a sport within the UK, making its governing body, ParkourUK,... more , parkour was formally recognised as a sport within the UK, making its governing body, ParkourUK, eligible for funding from Sport England and other funding bodies. Sport England's most recent 'Active Lives' survey found that approximately 96,700 people regularly participate in parkour in England (Sport England, 2017). 2 Parkour Generations; Storror; Storm; Tempest Freerunning; 3Run; Take Flight; Airborn Academy; Apeuro; Verang; Lachette; Etre-Fort are just a few examples of the parkour teams and brands throughout the parkour community. Talented traceurs have featured in TV shows such as Ninja Warrior UK, along with other reality TV shows and feature films.