Thomas on Crime as an Assemblage @crowdedmouth

Phil Crockett Thomas, University of Glasgow, is publishing Crime as an Assemblage in the Journal of Theoretical & Philosophical Criminology for 2020. Here is the abstract.

This article seeks to make an original contribution to criminology and the sociology of crime and punishment by elaborating the ‘assemblage’, a concept which originates in the collaborative poststructuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and discussing its ontological implications for researching crime. I will first introduce the concept and its application. I then discuss the relationship between the assemblage and Michel Foucault’s concept of the dispositif. I demonstrate how the assemblage could be used to analyze crime events and discuss questions of change and scale within the assemblage. I conclude by outlining some implications for how adopting this concept would change the way we practice and research crime and punishment.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bruncevic @doctorbruncevic Publishing Book With Routledge on Law, Art, and the Commons

Forthcoming from Routledge:

Merima Bruncevic, Department of Law, University of Gothenburg, is publishing Law, Art and the Commons (November 30, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The concept of the cultural commons has become increasingly important for legal studies. Within this field, however, it is a contested concept: at once presented as a sphere for creativity, democratic access and freedom of speech, and as one that denies property rights and misappropriates the public domain. In this book, Merima Bruncevic takes up the cultural commons not merely as an abstract notion, but in its connection to physical spaces such as museums and libraries. A legal cultural commons can, she argues, be envisioned as a lawscape that can quite literally be entered and engaged with. Focusing largely on artin the context of the copyright regime, but also addressing a number of cultural heritage issues, the book draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to examine the realm of the commons as a potential space for overcoming the dichotomy between the owner and the consumer of culture. Challenging this dichotomy, it is the productive and creative potential of law itself that is elicited through the book’s approach to the commons as the empirical basis for a new legal framework, which is able to accommodate a multitude of interests and values.