The spark for Dr. David Kauzlarich’s next book came as he observed the Occupy movement in St. Louis in 2008.
“It seemed like almost every other person had an acoustic guitar, and almost every other night there’d be bands out there if the cops didn’t break it up,” he says. “It was as much a part of the message, it seemed, as when people had the bullhorn.”
The combination of music and protest against misdeeds of the powerful blended two of his primary interests – scholarly and personal.
Kauzlarich came to UNC Greensboro in 2017 to head the Department of Sociology. His academic career has focused on criminal justice and criminology, and he has coauthored a number of books, including “Crimes of the Powerful” and “Towards a Victimology of State Crime.” He concentrates his work on crimes such as human rights violations, illegal wars, and anti-democratic practices against journalists. Kauzlarich was drawn to the Occupy movement for that reason.
“I started looking at resistance to perceived state and corporate wrongdoing, ethical issues, disproportionate coddling of corporations – the ’08 housing scandal, Bank of America, and all that,” he says. “The literature in criminology really didn’t have a lot to say about how people resist that through social movements.”
His book in progress is called “Theorizing Resistance: Music, Politics, and the Crimes of the Powerful.” The focus is punk rock and how, Kauzlarich says, music can spotlight and spur resistance to crimes at a state level. He is the first criminologist to examine connections between music and resistance to high-level crimes, he says, though detractors may question whether music can produce political change.
