Alistair Fraser

Alistair Fraser is Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He holds an LLB (Hons) and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Glasgow, and an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Oxford. He has also spent time as either student or visiting scholar at Queensland University of Technology, University of Illinois-Chicago, and University of Edinburgh. His work focuses on issues of youth, crime and globalisation, with a particular focus on youth ‘gangs’ in a global and comparative perspective. His work has been published in Theoretical Criminology, Youth Justice and the Journal of Youth Studies. His first book, Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.

Alistair’s previous post was as Assistant Professor in Criminology in the Department of Sociology, University of Hong Kong, where he was also Assistant Director of the Masters in Social Sciences (Criminology) programme. Whilst there he was awarded the ‘Outstanding Teaching Award’ for the Faculty of Social Sciences in 2014, and acted as co-Principal Investigator (with Dr Susan Batchelor, University of Glasgow) on an ESRC-funded study of youth leisure in Hong Kong and Glasgow. The two-year qualitative study, titled (Re)Imagining Youth, explored similarity and difference in the leisure lives of young people in both fieldsites. Alistair remains Honorary Assistant Professor in Criminology at the University of Hong Kong.

Resarch interests: young people and youth ‘gangs’; youth violence and youth justice; cultural criminology and sociology of risk-taking; critical and theoretical criminology; criminology and social theory; children’s geographies; youth and social change; ethnography and participatory action-research.