Image from ACLU.org
Tag Archives: Immigration
Papers and Panels of Interest at the 2017 American Anthropological Association Meeting
Once again, it is that very special time of year: The American Anthropological Association’s 116th Annual Meeting. This year in Washington, D.C.
As impassioned followers of this blog know, we like to curate a list of sessions and papers of interest to our readers. This year 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 #AmAnth2017 hashtag with which several participants will be live-tweeting sessions and other events.
The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus Project, Week 10: Sameena Mulla on AAA2016
In the Journals – March 2015
In the Journals – January 2015
In the Journals – August 2014
Economies of Security and Care in Catalonia, Spain
The editors of Anthropoliteia welcome Johanna Römer with a Dossier in our From the Field section.
“The history of prisons in Spain?” a Catalan prison guard asked me, a man in his mid-forties, his hands resting on a heavy leather belt. “Everything has already been written. Our vocabulary, our forms of punishment – even the word cell itself, all come from Catholic and monastic practices.”
He turned to face the thick glass wall of the bunker.
“I spent years teaching…in law enforcement, in the private sector, and now I just want to be here, with these guys [inmates], where I can have peace and quiet,” he said, nodding towards a small group of men talking softly around a checked tablecloth whose color was imperceptible through the glass.
“Look at that. No one makes problems.”
While monitoring the inmates through the glass, the guard narrated other stories of prison work; but his last seemingly unremarkable comment, “no one makes problems,” stayed with me.
In the Journals, Spring 2014
Ethnic Profiling as a Societal Institution in the Netherlands
Psychologism and profiling ‘the other’
It is common knowledge in the sociology of police that law enforcers do not merely apply legal maxims but ‘employ discretion in invoking the law’, as Egon Bittner already put it in 1970 in The Functions of the Police in Modern Society. There is often not much consistency in the application of the law as beat officers have a large leeway when they operate in the blind spot of their desk superiors, that is, on the street. While on the beat, policing may be turned into a mechanism of social ordering that has the potential to significantly alter the life prospects of those who are encountered. When roaming in the districts, containing a demonstration, responding to an emergency call, mediating a conflict, investigating a homicide, or containing a riot, the police are actually (re)producing social hierarchies and differences in the settings in which they operate. Continue reading