Urbaria Guest Lecture with Professor Alistair Fraser

Welcome to an Urbaria Guest Lecture with Professor Alistair Fraser (University of Glasgow)!

Date: 23 November 2026
Time: 16.15-17.45
Place: B212 (room 2), Metsätalo (Unioninkatu 40, Helsinki)

Gangs and the Gig Economy: Violence, New Media and the Street Field
Alistair Fraser

Abstract
Highly visible, street-based groups of young people, engaging in crime or violent conflict, have been reported in spaces of advanced marginality throughout the world and in many cases, these forms of identification have long historical antecedents, with marked continuities over time and space. This has led to conceptualisations, drawing on Bourdieu, of a ‘street field’ in which criminal actors enter into struggle for resources in the form of ‘street capital’. As in other field environments, however, the ‘rules of the game’ within the street field are subject to change (Bourdieu 2017). Recent scholarship has, for example, drawn attention to a range of external causes for change in the nature and texture of ‘road capitals’ (Bakkali 2022) within the street field – including the impact of digital street culture (Lane 2019), shifting patterns of drug distribution (Bakken et al 2023), and the fragmentation of territorial identity (Aspholm 2020). In this paper, drawing on a longitudinal ethnography of young people’s ‘gang’ identification in Glasgow, Scotland, I trace the shifting dynamics of violence against a backdrop of social change. Where the drivers of street violence among young people were once found in neighbourhood disputes, the roots of such conflicts now exist across virtual and physical boundaries amid increased precarity in both the licit and illicit economies – prompting new questions for the nature and meaning of ‘gang’ identity in the digital age.

Bio
Alistair Fraser is Professor of Criminology at the University of Glasgow, where he teaches and researches issues of youth violence, street culture, and urban crime, with an abiding interest in the global gang phenomenon.

The following speakers will provide brief comments after the presentation:
Kimmo Nuotio, Professor of Criminal Law and the Director of the Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy
David Inglis, Professor of Sociology
Juuda Tamminen, PhD student, researcher on project ”The Moral Drama of Street Gangs. A multidimensional approach to the ”gang problem” in Finland”

After the lecture, we invite you to stay for a glass of wine and a chance to talk with the speakers and other participants.