ABSTRACT
In the international protest around this execution, flows of information and those of people came together in the mediated spectacle of punishment. Communication is a matter of movement. Debates about communication in the early twentieth century encompassed both the movements of images and ideas, and those of people. A discourse on changing mobilities, cultural identities and crime emerged within work published by members of the Chicago school of sociology during the 1920s and 1930s. Their concepts were grounded within a particular set of ideas about mobilities, identities and forms of belonging. Chicago school scholars inherited Durkheim’s politics of assimilation and applied them to elucidate crime in early-twentieth-century America. The Chicagoan discourse on mobilities and crime is part of the colonial and national histories of the USA. I argue that these concepts are implicated in the processes by which the USA demarcated its nationals from ‘foreigners’.
