Media and Policing

Catalog description

An examination of the relationship between police power and modern image-making technologies from a variety of critical historiographical and theoretical perspectives. We will trace a genealogy of the present by putting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century methodologies and visual culture in conversation with new research methods and media. Topics to be discussed include: the production of criminality, physiognomy and phrenology, carceral geography, crime statistics and predictive policing, carceral aesthetics, counter forensics, and abolition. Course readings will be discussed in relation to screenings and close study of artifacts and technologies that operate at the intersection of policing and media.