P.C. 77 by Edward Wolfe c.1927

We are happy to continue announcing the exciting changes that are rolling out here at Anthropoliteia. You’ve already heard about our new snazzy design and two of our new features, “Dispatches” and “In the Journals“.  In the meantime we’ve also snuck in our very own domain name: anthropoliteia.net  For most of you this should make very little difference, in any.  Your browser and rss reader should automatically redirect you from our old WordPress address to the new one, but this change affords us a greater deal of flexibility with the site design going forward.

Beyond this, we’re also making some substantive changes.  For one we’ve decided to expand the scope of our interests.  When we started out way back in 2009 it was as a group of young scholars trying to define for ourselves what studying police as anthropologists–as opposed to, say, studying crime, criminals or punishment– might entail.  While this is still an important issue for many of us, we’ve also decided that the time was right to expand our focus to incorporate some of those larger topics.  In doing so, we’ve also decided to expand beyond the discipline of anthropology per se to include what one might call the “broadly humanistic criminological sciences”.   As a result, we’ve changed our tagline to “critical perspectives on police, security, crime, law and punishment”.

Along with this new design, new domain name, new focus and new features come some new faces.  Most of them will get their proper introduction over time, but for now I encourage you to check out the “About Us” page under the main menu. 

Finally a word about the new semi-regular feature we’re calling “Dossiers”. Along with “Dispatches”, Dossiers will make up the suite of posts appearing “From the Field”.  As opposed to the more impressionistic ambiance of the Dispatches, Dossiers will feature projects at a more developed stage in the research process, ideally offering the sophistication of peer-reviewed work but for the consumption of a wider non-specialist blog audience.

With that said, I am honored to be able to present the first of these to you now, a submission from anthropologist Yağmur Nuhrat on the political side-effects of policing football spectators in Turkey.  We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we do bringing it to you.