Liam Kennedy is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology at King's University College at Western University Canada. He is the co-editor of Power Played: A Critical Criminology of Sport.
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Description
"In this powerful and unsettling study, Liam Kennedy shows how children's popular culture provides the foundational carceral scripts for our children, handcuffing their imaginations around harm, safety, and accountability. With clarity and rigor, Kennedy illustrates how even the most seemingly innocent stories - picture-book bears, heroic puppies, goofy villains - reproduce racialized ideas about 'bad guys' and render cops and cages normalized. Moving deftly from LEGO play to PAW Patrol, from Berenstain Bears to Dog Man, Cops and Robbers maps a dense landscape of copaganda and carceral common sense that is as intimate as the bedtime story. It offers scholars and caregivers concrete tools for asking better questions about what kids are being taught - and what else they might learn instead, revealing that alternatives to criminalization and incarceration are both thinkable and already in motion. This book should be required reading not only for criminologists, media scholars, and educators but for show runners, children's book publishers, and, most importantly, parents." - Michelle Brown, co-author of Under the Gun: Criminology Goes Back to the Movies