The Hard Man in the Call-Centre
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 21 June 2019
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
New Generation Thinker Alistair Fraser on the fates and fortunes of Glaswegian tough guys. Recorded with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. To hear audience questions download the Essay as an episode of the BBC Arts&Ideas podcast.
The image of the hard man runs like an electric current through Glasgow's history. Unafraid, unabashed, with outlaw swagger, he stalks the pages of countless crime novels and TV dramas. The unpredictable tough guy, schooled in both fist and knife, a symbol of the city's industrial past. But what does being a hard man mean in the Glasgow of today, now call-centre capital of Europe? And what lessons can be drawn from his changing fates and fortunes to understand masculinity and violence elsewhere?
Alistair Fraser is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. He has spent the last fifteen years studying youth gangs and street culture around the world, and is author of two academic books, Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City (2015, Oxford University Press), and Gangs & Crime: Critical Alternatives (2017, Sage). He makes regular contributions to public debate on gangs and youth violence, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and 4 on Thinking Allowed, More or Less, and Free Thinking.
Alistair Fraser in a Free Thinking Festival debate about gangs https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09w7qqg Alistair Fraser looks at Doing Nothing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09v66bh Audience questions of this Essay are found here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrvk3/episodes/downloads
Producer; Jacqueline Smith
Transcript
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| 0:40.2 | In this episode, we'll be asking what it is to be a man. |
| 0:44.3 | I'm Sophie Colombo, a new generation thinker. |
| 0:47.3 | That's a scheme run jointly by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and by the BBC |
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| 1:29.9 | Welcome to New Generation Thinkers, To Be a Man, a series of the essay recorded for BBC Radio |
| 1:36.7 | 3 before an audience at the York Festival of Ideas 2019. |
| 1:41.7 | Alistair Fraser is a senior lecturer in criminology at the Scottish Centre for Crime and |
| 1:46.9 | Justice Research at the University of Glasgow. He has spent the last 15 years studying youth gangs |
| 1:53.0 | and street culture around the world, publishes widely on that subject and is a regular contributor |
| 1:58.6 | to public debates on gangs and youth violence today. |
| 2:02.6 | But tonight he is perhaps in more misty-eyed mode. |
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