French Connection in Criminology

Bruce A. Arrigo is Professor and Chair of Criminal Justice at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of many books, including Psychological Jurisprudence: Critical Explorations in Law, Crime, and Society, also published by SUNY Press. Dragan Milovanovic is Professor of Justice Studies at Northeastern Illinois University and the author of many books, including An Introduction to the Sociology of Law. Robert Carl Schehr is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University and the author of Dynamic Utopia: Establishing Intentional Communities as a New Social Movement.

"In an effort to overcome the criticism that postmodern theory is negative and impractical, the authors of this volume explore the promise of postmodern theory to generate alternative, liberating, transformative practices in the field of criminal law … [they] invite readers to engage French critical theorists and to imagine the possibilities for applications in the struggle for a more humane society." — Theoretical Criminology"…what Arrigo, Milovanovic, and Schehr have accomplished with this book is to simplify and reduce many of the complexities of modernity, postmodernity, chaos theory, and other forms of nonlinear reasoning, rendering them understandable for the average reader. This achievement alone is nothing short of remarkable." — Criminal Justice Review"Anyone who teaches in the field of criminology, socio-legal studies, or, more broadly, justice studies, will at some point have had to face the dearth of textbook materials that provide students with an easily accessible overview and critical analysis of the application of recent theories and models of continental thought to their field of study. One of the aims of this book is to provide teachers and students with precisely such a critical overview. It … does the pedagogical job well." — International Journal for the Semiotics of Law"This book is the first of its kind. It addresses fundamental epistemological and ontological questions in the pursuit of understanding social and human behavior across a wide spectrum of disciplines and fields of study." — Gregg Barak, author of Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding

• Introduction 1. Establishing the First Wave: The Linguistic Turn in Social Theory 2. Sustaining the First Wave: More on the Linguistic Turn in Social Theory 3. The Second Wave: Interpreting the Past, Building the Present, and Looking Toward the Future 4. Confinement Law and Prison Resistance: Applications in Critical Penology 5. Critical Race Theory and Postmodern Analysis: Strength in Dialectical Unity 6. Cinema and Literary Texts, Différance, and Social Justice Studies 7. Restorative Justice and Victim Offender Mediation: Towards a Transformative Praxis 8. Social Movements as Nonlinearity: On Innocence Projects and Intentional Communities Conclusion: Back to the Future: Rediscovering Crime, Law, and Social Change Notes References Index