A vengeful education? urban revanchism, sex work and the penal politics of john schools

Abstract

This paper considers how useful the urban revanchism thesis is in helping us understand the John School, a 'mobile' educational programme that has been rolled out in the United States, Canada, the UK and South Korea which teaches those arrested for soliciting for the purposes of buying sex the negative consequences of their actions. The paper begins by unpacking the urban revanchism thesis and bringing it into dialogue with ideas on punishment. It then draws on a case study of one English John School in the anonymised town of Redtown. It demonstrates that the operations and rationales of the Redtown John School have traces of revanchism and that they are also infused by ideas and practices of care. As a result it argues that the urban revanchism thesis illuminates some important aspects of the Redtown John School while silencing or misreading others. The paper concludes therefore by calling for future research to think more broadly about punishment (rather than revanchism) in the city and its entanglements with care.

Right To The City: Lagos, An Emerging Revanchist City In Nigeria?

“…In analysing revanchism in New York, Smith (1998 p. 1 cited in Cook, 2014) describes it as an act of avenging those who have "stolen New York from the white middle class people that see the city as their birthright". He highlights a range of revanchist strategies in 'post-liberal' New York (between 1994-2001 as 'zero tolerance' policing within public space, associated police brutality and abuse, high levels of incarceration, termination of contracts for some providers of homeless shelters, the removal of the homeless from public space, state-sponsored gentrification, the shrinking and marketisation of welfare services for marginalised groups, and cutbacks imposed on the City University of New York.…”

“…On the contrary, Cook (2014) argues that revanchism should be understood as a form of punishment. According to him punishment can sometimes be viewed as the opposite of revenge.…”

“…Important within this, is that the pain or unpleasantness involved in the punishment, is for the most part intended and not merely a coincidental or accidental outcome. Cook (2014) further states that framing urban revanchism as punishment, therefore, blends two schools of reasoning for punishment: retributivism and consequentialism. Urban revanchism is retributive in the sense that it is backward-looking i.e.…”

“…In view of the afore-stated, this article adopts the definitions by Harvey (2008) and Cook (2014). This implies that urban revanchism is zero tolerance and punishment to the marginalised population for their misdemeanours, crimes of taking to the city and phobia of what might happen in the future.…”

“…as the major threats to urban order and the culprits of urban decay. MacLeod (2002 cited in Cook, 2014) suggested that dismissive treatment of the homeless people in Glasgow, Scotland in the 1990s was imprints of an emerging politics of revanchism. Uitermark andDuyvendak (2008 cited in Cook, 2014) identified another type of revanchism.…”