Brent, of Florence, who earlier this year earned a master’s degree in criminal justice, was honored for a paper that was part of his EKU master’s thesis entitled “The Barbaric Spectacle of Late Modern Fighting.”

“It’s important to note that he was competing with papers submitted by students well into their doctoral programs from all over the world,” said Dr. Peter Kraska, professor of criminal justice and police studies at EKU. “His was the only master’s student’s paper, and this is the first time that a master’s-level research project has won this prestigious award.

“His research was significant in that it is the first academic study inquiring into the increasingly popular activity of ‘cage fighting,’” Kraska added, noting that Brent spent approximately 18 months conducting ethnographic research into both state-sanctioned and underground fighting activities.

After graduating from EKU, Brent received a doctoral fellowship to the University of Delaware’s Ph.D. program. Meanwhile, he and Kraska (with Brent as principal author) have recently “finished getting the paper in shape” to send to the journal Social Problems, Kraska said. The pair is also presenting part of the research in November at the upcoming American Society of Criminology meeting in Philadelphia, where Brent will receive his award.

The abstract for “Tapping into ‘Tap-Out’: The Barbaric Spectacle of Underground Fighting” follows:

“Few events can ignite public controversy like the act of violence. A fascinating new development – human cage fighting – has generated massive audiences and significant media attention. Growing beneath the visceral spectacle of the media is an underworld of human fighting that is gripping the contemporary late-modern culture. Market forces have dictated that the state legitimize this counter-culture that would otherwise be considered criminal and deviant. Despite the significant implications stemming from this phenomenon, criminology has yet to inquire into this rapidly growing trend. This study sheds some initial empirical and theoretical light on ‘human fighting’ by employing a mixed methods approach, making use of both ethnographic field research and content analysis. The ethnography allows for an intimate understanding of both state-sanctioned and underground human fighting activities, while the content analysis situates them within a larger social context. These findings are contextualized within a late/post-modern framework in order to make sense of this little understood phenomenon.”