Appel à contributions pour un livre sur le comportement antisocial en Grande-Bretagne.

Presentation

Antisocial behaviour offends, causes alarm, or distresses to another person, a neighbourhood, or a community, but is not necessarily criminal. Antisocial behaviour takes many forms: from swearing, loitering and bullying, to fare dodging, phone-hacking and civil disobedience. Moreover, it is a nebulous term since what one person considers to be antisocial and offensive another can deem social and progressive, for example in the case of direct action. According to various surveys, antisocial behaviour impinges considerably on the quality of life of those affected by it who can be from any age group. Antisocial behaviour can be witnessed across the cities and countryside of Britain today. However, individuals or groups of people behaving badly in a deviant, non-normative manner is not at all new.

Throughout the centuries, governments have tried to control, contain, or curb antisocial behaviour. This has often taken the form of repressive legislation. For example, in the mid-18th century the Gin Act, 1751, was voted to reduce the binge-drinking vividly portrayed by William Hogarth (1697-1764) in Gin Lane (1750). Begging and poverty were swept away into workhouses during the Victorian era. With the Crime and Disorder Act, 1998 the Labour Government introduced Antisocial Behaviour Orders – ASBOs. 

This edited book – Antisocial Behaviour in Britain since the 18th Century: sociological and political perspectives – will deal with diverse forms of antisocial behaviour in Britain from the 18th century to the 21st century.

It will treat antisocial behaviour from the perspectives of sociology and the political sciences.

There will be two main themes:

1) How and why individuals and/or groups of people have acted antisocially.

2) How and why governments have attempted to deal with antisocial behaviour.

Articles will encompass the social, political and economic causes and consequences of antisocial behaviour in a specific field and/or the governmental responses.

Articles could deal with antisocial behaviour in a range of settings, for example, antisocial behaviour in the work environment, among different professions (politicians, journalists, bankers, the police), or antisocial behaviour in the social environment, during leisure time (sports-related hooliganism, binge-drinking).

Articles could analyse the evolution of moral values or law and order. They could also examine representations of antisocial behaviour in the arts (e.g. This is England, 2007, Shane Meadows).

To submit

• Selected articles will feature in a blind peer reviewed edited book to be published late 2013.
  

• They will be added to articles stemming from papers that were given at the Crécib workshop on antisocial behaviour at the 2011 SAES annual congress.

• All articles will be in English and approximately 8,000-10,000 words including footnotes and bibliography.

• Please send proposals of around 250 words to Sarah.Pickard@univ-paris3.fr  CREC/CREW – EA4399, Institut du Monde Anglophone, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3.

by 15 July 2012