Three Sides to Every Story: Engaging an Autoethnographic Everyday Lived Experience of Race and Crime to Explore Legislative Policy-Practice Tackling the U.K. Gang

This thesis draws on entries from a personal journal to revisit selected publications from a body of work as part of an autoethnographic methodology to explored issues of race and crime and critically examine the implications of gang legislative policy-practice for urban black male youth. Through a reflexive process, findings and recommendations from selected policy research published between 2002 and 2011 is revisited and critically assessed against an everyday lived experience of race and crime. Findings from this research resists how criminological ideas are used to support an official view and approach to ‘problem youth’ and gangs in the U.K that developed after 2003. It analyses how young people and communities speak about local problems as a means of reconceptualising how youth behaviour is understood and develop alternative ways of tackling it.