On June 11, 2020 at 1pm EDT/11am PDT the American Anthropology Association is hosting a webinar titled: “Anthropology of Policing: The Persistence of Racialized Police Brutality and Community Responses – What Can Anthropologists Contribute?

Featuring a variety of panelists, including Ramona Perez, Kalfani Ture, Donna Auston, Shanti Parikh, and Avram Bornstein, discussions will be guided by two principle questions: (1) What should an Anthropology of policing look like and (2) What practical and actionable steps should anthropologists, as cultural experts of the lived experiences of impacted communities, take to transform American policing.

This webinar is FREE and open to the public. Instructions for how to access this event can be found here. The full event abstract is provided below.

Over the past several days, we have witnessed the continued devolution of what already is a tenuous relationship between police and communities of color. Sadly, the dramatic deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and George Floyd add to a multitude of black and brown bodies that police have violently destroyed extra-judicially. No less traumatic are the quotidian encounters people of color experience with police that account for the frequent stop, question and frisk, racial profiling, driving while black and other forms of intrusive surveillance. The oppressive relationship between police and communities of color represent a national crisis, which is chronic, systemic, and driven by white supremacy, rather than the isolated results of a few bad apples spoiling the orchard. This fraught relationship is further complicated by the current COVID-19 pandemic, the pre-existing structural inequalities, and lateral policing. Informed by white supremacy, lateral policing is the active recruitment of everyday white citizens (see something, say something) to surveil black and brown bodies, mobilize/weaponize police resources against these bodies and their normal social practices, and in some instances calling for the full assumption of police authority to apprehend and incapacitate these bodies when they are perceived as threats.

Our colleagues in mental health, public health, sociology/social welfare, political science, and law along with community organizers and activists are actively developing interventions to improve this broken relationship, while anthropologists, by-and-large, conference the issue and or engage in scholarly activity within and among other anthropologists. This virtual discussion seeks to shift the various scholarly activities anthropologists engage in concerning police brutality and state sanctioned violence to a more public facing direction. Further, this discussion is guided by two principle questions: (1) What should an Anthropology of policing look like and (2) What practical and actionable steps should anthropologists, as cultural experts of the lived experiences of impacted communities, take to transform American policing.

Panelists:  

Ramona Perez, San Diego State University
Kalfani Ture, Quinnipiac University 
Donna Auston, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey 
Shanti Parikh, Washington University, St. Louis 
Avram Bornstein, John Jay College of Criminal Justice 

This webinar is hosted by the American Anthropological Association and presented by the Center for the Ethnographic Study of Public Safety and Community in collaboration with the Association of Black Anthropologists, the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists, and the American Ethnological Association.
View/download the promotional flyer. 

Registration 

This webinar is FREE and open to the public. Register Today (Select ‘AAA webinar’ as ‘meeting type’) Having trouble registering? View additional instructions

Real Time Captioning will be available during this webinar and on YouTube upload following the webinar. When and if possible, a PDF and/or PPT of the webinar slides will be available in advance on the event’s Communities page. Additional accommodations, such as ASL, may be requested during the webinar registration process. If you have additional access needs or accommodation requests, please email accessibility@americananthro.org as soon as possible so we can support you.