Policing and Incarceration in Anthropological Perspective

Catalog description

Police in the United States have come under greater public scrutiny in recent years, particularly as cell-phone videos make visible abuses by police, prompting nation-wide protests for social justice, police reform, and abolition. Increased scholarly attention to the police centers on racial profiling, "broken windows" policing strategies, mass incarceration, the surveillance state, political protests, and intensified immigration and national border policing. While the police represent state authority, ordinary policing practices are notoriously difficult to study, thereby eliding variable conditions and contradictions. This course interrogates policing and carceral practices by focusing on the purpose of the police, quotidian policing practices, and territorial control in diverse U.S. and global contexts. Course readings emphasize ethnographies of policing, along with key texts from critical geography and related fields, to elucidate multiple topographies of policing, control, and neglect at work in governing contemporary societies.