Alistair Fraser

Alistair Fraser is Professor of Criminology at the University of Glasgow and has spent the last twenty years studying youth gangs, violence and street culture around the world primarily as an academic researcher but also as a police analyst, community youth worker, street outreach worker, and high school tutor. His first book, Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City (2015, Oxford University Press), was awarded the British Society of Criminology Book Prize for 2016 and was one of six shortlisted for the BBC 'Thinking Allowed Award for Ethnography' in the same year. His second book, Gangs & Crime: Critical Alternatives (2017) is published by Sage. In 2017, he was named as one of the BBC’s ‘New Generation Thinkers’ and has featured regularly in print media, radio and TV. Ali has written and produced features for BBC Radio 3 and spoken on Radio 4. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, The Scotsman, The Herald, The Bell and The Conversation. He has appeared on STV’s ‘Scotland Tonight’, and BBC’s ‘London News’ and ‘Timeline’ discussing gangs. He wrote and presented the podcast Young Warriors, which was released by The Big Light in May 2025. You can read more about Ali and his work here.