Gang activity synonym9/1/2023 Our standpoint combines post-subcultural studies and decolonial theoretical perspectives with critical criminology focusing on challenging traditional understandings and uncovering false beliefs about youth street groups. Both groups face big challenges regarding new generations in their homelands and in their diasporic new land where their collective forms of behaviour have been seen as barriers to their social inclusion. Some research focuses on proactive experiences in gang behaviour and policies (Leinfelt and Rostami 2011 Venkatesh 2009), but very few studies systematically compare such aspects in order to find variants and invariants in the evolution or in the reversal of the criminal gang model, use a transnational comparative methodology or focus on a group rarely included in gang studies (Young Arabs) along with another over-studied group (Young Latinos). Our aim is to situate the experiences of youths at the centre of the project, unveiling the positive aspects of youth street sociability and how marginalized position within social structure is resisted and remade as a consequence. The project is based on an experimental approach that combines “extended case method” (Burawoy 2009) with “relational ethnography” (Desmond 2010) and departs from the twentieth century’s model of studying youth street groups (a model that privileged local, coetaneous, male and face-to-face gangs). This paper explores the methodological and ethical challenges of developing an ethnographic project on such a large scale and with such a high degree of cultural difference between the field sites and communities of study. The study began in 2018 and is due to finish in 2022. This paper presents preliminary findings from a large-scale, multi-sited ethnographic study (Marcus 1995) of transnational youth gangs in 12 different cities around the globe (Barcelona, Madrid, Marseille and Milan in Southern Europe Casablanca, Tunis, Algiers and Djendel in Northern Africa Medellin, San Salvador, Santiago de Cuba and Chicago in the Americas). Gang identities in the global era are best understood as hybrid clusters of elements taken from the respective countries of origin of gang members they are nomadic identities that, just like other contemporary “youth cultures”, appropriate and reproduce styles and trends as they circulate around the globe (Nilan and Feixa 2006). Instead, gangs today are structurally fluid, have significant geographic mobility and, due to patterns of human migration and globalization, organise and have a strong presence on social media (Reguillo 1995 Brotherton and Barrios 2004 Perea 2007). Modern gangs are not strictly territorial, nor do they have compact structures. Footnote 2 In contrast, ethnographic work has revealed that contemporary gang formations diverge significantly from this normative model. The use of quantitative data and positivist methodologies has tended to result in rather Eurocentric accounts in which the “US gang stereotype” acts as a kind of global “gang archetype”. Academic researchers have increasingly sought to survey the global topography of gangs in order to define the “universal characteristics” of groups that operate in different cultural contexts (Klein 1971 Miller 1992 Esbensen and Maxson 2012). Gangs Footnote 1 have been described as an episodic phenomenon comparable across diverse geographical sites. How can complex social forms such as street gangs be researched in the twenty-first century? Can a single ethnographic approach be shared by researchers working in entirely different cultural contexts? What novel methodological and ethical challenges emerge from such a task and how might they be resolved? This article examines the methodological perspectives of the TRANSGANG project. So, research about youth street groups requires an innovative methodological approach to develop a renewed approach for the twenty-first century’s youth street groups, different from the local, coetaneous, male and face-to-face model, used to understand the twentieth century’s gangs. Mirroring this trend, academic researchers have increasingly sought to survey the global topography of gangs through positivist methodologies that seek out universal characteristics of gangs in different cultural contexts. Gangs have been described as an episodic phenomenon comparable across diverse geographical sites, with the US gang stereotype often acting as the archetype.
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