Author Archives: kevinkarpiak
CFP [AAA 2018], Secura: Security as the Absence (and Presence) of Care
Please kindly consider the following panel proposal for the 2018 Annual Meeting for the American Anthropological Association (November 14-18, 2018 in San Jose, California).
Panel Title: Secura: Security as the Absence (and Presence) of Care
Panel Organizer: Alex Jong-Seok Lee (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Panel Discussant: Jeffrey T. Martin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Security is ubiquitous. Didier Fassin describes it as “a keyword and a leitmotiv of national and international policies in many domains” (Security: A Conversation with the Authors 2008). Although traditionally within the purview of International Studies, security has emerged as a popular subject of anthropological study. Specifically, anthropology has enhanced our understanding of security’s relationship with topics like urban policing (Fassin 2013), migration and human rights (Burrell 2010), the National Security State (Price 1998), and biological weapons (i.e., “biosecurity”) (Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow 2004)—among many others. Yet, security’s meaning(s) often remain(s) ill-defined. Likewise, most studies of security (though valuable) tend to focus on core concepts like the state, violence, war, and peace while the idea of security itself can produce a “masculine bias” (Sjoberg 2009). Hence, as an idea and ideal, security continually must be unpacked and situated within specific historical, political, and social contexts (Stewart and Choi 2012).
Etymologically, security denotes the removal (se) of “concern” or “care” (cura) and, therefore, implies a condition that is either carefree or careless (Hamilton 2013). That is, the condition of feeling secure necessitates the work of others in producing care. Recent anthropologies of care (Raijman and Schammah-Gesser 2003; Buch 2013; Baldassar and Merla 2013), chiefly those highlighting gendered migrant care labor, have grown. But few have foregrounded the complementary relationship between ostensibly distinct practices of care and security. How might viewing care—both in its presence and absence—and (in)security as mutually constitutive unveil the (invisible) feminized work behind managing individual and collective conflict? Similarly, how might posing security as a masculinized display of (un)caring practices highlight the performative dimensions of the former?
This panel follows interventions by feminist security studies (Ahall 2015), as well as calls for more critical comparative ethnographies of security (Goldstein 2010). It seeks papers that advance more inclusive understandings of security that highlight the centrality of gender and the everyday situatedness of securitizing acts. We ask: within which diverse local work contexts might an “ethics of care” (Gilligan 1982)—the theory that care’s core elements of sustaining human relationships and dependencies should achieve moral significance–manifest as a viable alternative to a rationalized perspective of “indifference” (Herzfeld 1992) and justice undergirding conventional logics of security? What are the conceptual and practical implications of productively disrupting pat distinctions between the labor of care and security? For example, in what ways might care labor also serve to (re)produce modes of social inclusion and exclusion? Likewise, how might viewing security as embodied acts of absent (and present) care shift our knowledge about global regimes of gendered (e.g., care, affective, intimate) labor, precarity, and agency?
If you would like to participate in this panel, please send a 250-word abstract of your paper presentation by Friday, April 9, 2018 to Alex Lee (lee828@illinois.edu).

New book series, Police/Worlds: studies in security, crime and governance
When we started this blog over 8 years (!) ago, part of the motivation was that those of us working on issues of policing from within the discipline of anthropology felt relatively disjointed and in need of a common forum to figure out just where we could go with our research as a collective project.
One of the benefits of entering the “Associate Professor” stage of one’s career, I suppose, is that you get to start seeing some of your long term goals for the discipline take form: I’m happy to announce the launch of Police/Worlds: studies in security, crime and governance, a new monograph series for Cornell University Press edited by myself, Ilana Feldman, William Garriott and Sameena Mulla (all of whom will be familiar to dedicated readers of this blog). Everyone involved with Police/Worlds is hoping that it become a forum in which new approaches to studying police can find space and talk to each other.
Year-End Reflections on The 2016-17 Anthropoliteia BlackLivesMatterSyllabus Project
The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus Project, Week 25: Kevin G. Karpiak on the banality of police violence

Desk of a Police sergeant in Munich, Germany © Wikimedia Commons
CFP: Anthropology of Police: Techno-politics, Reform, and Questions of Violence #AAA2017
Call for Papers for AAA 2017 Meeting in Washington, DC
Session Title: Anthropology of Police: Techno-politics, Reform, and Questions of Violence
Organizer: Hayal Akarsu
Discussant: Kevin G. Karpiak Continue reading
The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus Project, Week 12: Kevin G. Karpiak on the critical potential of an anthropology of police

On Tuesday Sept. 20, around 9 a.m. graffiti was found on the outer wall of EMU’s King Hall depicting hate speech. Picture taken after some writing was removed. (photo credit: Shayler Barnes Jr. / The Eastern Echo)
Papers and Panels of Interest at the #AAA2016 Meeting
It’s that time of year again: time for Anthropoliteia’s list of papers and panels pertaining to police, security, crime, law and punishment at the Annual Meeting s of the American Anthropological Association!
As impassioned followers of this blog know, we like to curate a list of sessions and papers of interest to our readers. We’ve created a Google Calendar, which you can find embedded below and import into your own. Be sure to keep an eye on @anthropoliteia’s twitter feed as well, where you’ll find coverage of the #AAA2016 hashtag with which several participants will be live-tweeting sessions ad other events.
Beyond that, we’d like to call your attention to two sessions in particular, which are direct offshoots of projects and collaborations on this blog:
Anthropoliteia in American Anthropologist’s review of Public Anthropology
In the most recent (September) issue of American Anthropologist, Angelique Haugerud has an excellent review of “Public Anthropology in 2015” which features both our series “#Ferguson & Elsewhere” and “Secularism & Security after Charlie Hebdo” in addition to various pieces by many former contributors (including myself, Orisanmi Burton, Paul Mutsaers, Jennie Simpson, A. Lynn Bolles, Bradley Dunseith, Michelle Stewart, Dylan Kerrigan, Didier Fassin, and Laurence Ralph)
Unfortunately it’s currently behind a paywall, but those of you with institutional access should check it out!
So wait, are there racial disparities in US policing or not? (Answer: YES!)
If you’re like me, you may have had two academic articles with seemingly conflicting arguments run through your Facebook feed lately. The first, an article by Cody T. Ross published via PLOS ONE uses a multi-level Bayesian analysis to conclude that there exists
evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average
The other, written by economist Roland G. Fryer and covered extensively in the New York Times Upshot column, concludes that in the case of “the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.”
How can such diametrically opposed claims be made simultaneously in reputable scientific journals? While much of these claims seems to rest in a domain of advanced statistics with which anthropologists typically feel less confident, the key to understanding their different claims actually might depend on a more “ethnographic” sense of the data sets they build upon.