Narrative habitus: Thinking through structure/agency in the narratives of offenders

Abstract

Starting from the premise that experience is narratively constituted and actions are oriented through the self as the protagonist in an evolving story, narrative criminology investigates how narratives motivate and sustain offending. Reviewing narrative criminological research, this paper contends that narrative criminology tends toward a problematic dualism of structure and agency, locating agency in individual narrative creativity and constraint in structure and/or culture. This paper argues for a different conceptualisation of narrative as embodied, learned and generative, drawing on Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Social action, which here includes storytelling, is structured via the habitus, which generates but does not determine social action.This theorisation understands structures and representations as existing in duality, according a more powerful role to storytelling. The paper concludes by discussion the implications of such a shift for narrative interventions toward offending.Key words: narrative criminology; structure; agency; Bourdieu; offending. Telling the story is not merely about loosening social ties to excuse his deviance, as neutralisation theory would suggest (Sykes and Matza 1968), but a deeper search for meaning and identity. Whereas neutralisations are highly strategic the narrative habitus conveys the way that narratives are natural and logical; the sense that the story could never have been otherwise. These characteristics of a narrative, its enduring nature, its connection to a life lived in a particular time and place, can be summed up in the notion of the narrative habitus.Narrative criminology examines the complex narrative work undertaken by offenders (Presser 2009). Some of the best work pays close attention to the importance of social structure in shaping the narratives that motivate and sustain offending. Yet, scholarship has tended to rely on a dualistic conceptualisation of structure/agency. If narrative criminology is to 1 Interestingly for narrative theorists, his account is explicitly literary; fragmented rather than chronological. The central concern is to quite literally decode the meaning of his lyrics for the reader. This representation is fundamentally an interpretation, rather than mere representation. He states: "I saw it note a tension between the apparently fluidity of narratives and the 'historical weight' of social structures, arguing that: 'A primary limitation of a discursive treatment of such inequalities is that structure needs to be understood beyond that which is "constantly produced from moment to moment"' (Miller et al. 2015: 92). Whilst narrative criminology perhaps inevitably brackets off objective social realities to focus closely on text, it has never insisted that narratives take primacy.Narrative criminology can engage with the 'real' world whilst also maintaining its distinct focus on subjectivity and narrative, but doing so entails bridges troublesome dualisms: the 'real world' and subjective experiences; speaking and doing; material and symbolic;...

Everyday self‐defence: Hollaback narratives, habitus and resisting street harassment

“…Narrative habitus (Fleetwood ; Frank ) theorizes connections between stories and social practices. It is apt for analysing how Hollaback narratives, as a form of quotidian culture (Highmore ), come to bear on women’s self‐defence, as a form of everyday social practice (Pink ).…”

“…I draw on Hollander’s definition of self‐defence practice as: ‘women’s use of any of a range of strategies – be they physical, verbal or emotional, to deter an immanent assault or resist an assault in progress’ (2018: 2). While it has long been acknowledged that women fight back and possess ‘unacknowledged knowledge’ about how to do so (Wise and Stanley : 11), this article draws on the concept of the narrative habitus (Fleetwood ; Frank ) to explore how activist narratives can inspire women’s on‐street self‐defence practice.…”

“… Interestingly, they note that generations of working‐class men have been instructed ‘not to take any shit’ (Winlow and Hall : 288). Arguably such maxims are part and parcel of the narrative habitus, and part of violent dispositions (Fleetwood ). …”

The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology

“…Sandberg further developed the framework (Sandberg 2010(Sandberg , 2013(Sandberg , 2016, and with colleagues he analysed the importance of stories for topics such as terrorism, illegal drugs, drinking, violence and humour. Connections were made with visual criminology (Sandberg and Ugelvik 2016b) and Bourdieusian criminology (Sandberg and Fleetwood 2017, see also Fleetwood 2014Fleetwood , 2016.…”

Opposing Violent Extremism through Counternarratives: Four Forms of Narrative Resistance

“…Although it might be expected that the gender, religious and cultural backgrounds of the interviewer would impact the narrative, for example whether interviewers were Muslims, ethnic minority or ethnic majority, in fact respondents' narratives were more similar than different (see also Damsa & Ugelvik, 2017). The different ways in which Muslims rejected extremist narratives were often the same, and seemed to reflect a narrative habitus (Fleetwood, 2016) -their structured and embodied ways of experiencing and acting in the worldrather than specific responses in and to the interview situation.…”