As debates on the rise of violent crime in London unfold, UK drill music is routinely accused of encouraging criminal behaviour among young Black Britons from deprived areas of the capital. Following a series of bans against drill music videos and the imposition of Criminal Behaviour Orders and gang injunctions against drill artists, discussions on the defensibility of such measures call for urgent, yet hitherto absent, sociological reflections on a topical issue. This article attempts to fill this gap, by demonstrating how UK drill and earlier Black music genres, like grime, have been criminalised and policed in ways that question the legitimacy of and reveal the discriminatory nature of policing young Black people by the London Metropolitan Police as the coercive arm of the British state. Drawing on the concept of racial neoliberalism, the policing of drill will be approached theoretically as an expression of the discriminatory politics that neoliberal economics facilitates in order to exclude those who the state deems undesirable or undeserving of its protection.

This article sets out to (re-)introduce Black urban musical subcultures as valuable forms of creativity and public expression in an attempt to resist, criticize and expose their criminalization by the London Metropolitan Police. Focusing primarily on grime, a host of unfair and illegitimate practices adopted by the London Metropolitan Police will be discussed. This will demonstrate how the routine monitoring, surveillance and curtailment of Black people’s public identity (re)produces stereotypical associations of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups with violent, criminal and problematic behaviour. In order to challenge openly discriminatory attitudes towards Black urban cultural forms by the police, a counterargument which calls for their understanding as viable sources of positive and constructive public engagement will be offered.

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Research into the sociology of intellectual life reveals numerous appeals to the public conscience of intellectuals. The way in which concepts such as "the public intellectual" or "intellectual life" are discussed however, conceals a long history of biased thinking about thinking as an elite endeavour with prohibitive requirements for entry. This article argues that this tendency prioritises the intellectual realm over the public sphere, and betrays any claims to public relevance unless a broader definition of what counts as intellectual life is introduced. By calling for a shift from the notion of public intellectuals to Jane Jacobs ' (1961) idea of the 'public character', a publicly-situated and affect-laden conception of intellectual life is articulated with the aim of redefining intellectual life as an ordinary, collective pursuit, rather than the prerogative of a few extraordinary individuals, as well as restoring the role of the senses in theoretical discussions on the life of the mind. The theoretical scope of this paper therefore is to cast the net wider in search for meanings of what public intellectual life is, can or may be in a larger context than "intellectualist" discussions currently allow. Full ArticleThis article sets out to discuss, critique, and repair the idea of public intellectuals as it currently informs the relevant literature in social theory. By arguing against and beyond the existing theoretical body of work on public intellectuals, an alternative conception of intellectual life is offered in the article's last section. The main argument here espoused, puts forward the view that the current interpretive framework with which social theorists approach intellectual life, reads like a rule book of exclusions which treats the life of the mind as an elite endeavour with prohibitive requirements for entry. For all its virtues and good intentions, such an understanding of intellectual life as beholden to a specific type of activity (thinking), an extraordinary kind of person (the intellectual), and a particular habitat (the world of letters), reflects a strikingly limited conception of what intellectual life is, may, or can be, a restricted sense of where intellectual life can be found, or made, and a puzzlingly stereotyped shortlist of potential candidates for the role.

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