Tag Archives: Pedagogy
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
The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus, Week 15: Ashanté Reese on Zora Neale Hurston and Refusing One Dimensional Blackness
The editors of Anthropoliteia are happy to relaunch the second semester of an ongoing series The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus Project, which will mobilize anthropological work as a pedagogical exercise addressing the confluence of race, policing and justice. You can see a growing bibliography of resources via our Mendeley feed. In this entry, Ashanté Reese discusses teaching from Zora Neale Hurston’s writings to explore many dimensions of blackness.
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)
The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus Project, Week 11: Jaime Alves on “The right and duty to change the world”
Anthropoliteia reacts to #Ferguson
It’s hard to know what exactly to say, to think, to feel or how to react at a time like this; even as a scholar of police. Which is not to say that everything in the case is terribly ambiguous. Quite the opposite: another young black man has been the victim of a deadly and unaccountable state violence in front of our very eyes. I suppose the disorientation lay in how to move forward, and for that I have no strong answers.
Embed from Getty ImagesHaving said that, several of us at Anthropolitiea have been active on Twitter, I imagine in an effort to make sense of exactly that existential question. This is not dissimilar to my own reaction during and after the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman affair. Below are some of our thoughts, as we form them:
Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and the Anthropology of Police
I’m sure I’m not the only one on this blog who’s been trying to think of a way to approach the whole Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman fiasco. Like a lot of scholarship, it’s just so hard to figure out what to add to the constant shit-storm of a media frenzy. But in my Police & Society class at EMU we have broached the topic, and the discussion has been both passionate and useful.
I thought I’d share the online discussion question I just prompted my students with. I’m curious to hear what readers of this blog might have to say. Here’s the prompt:
So our discussion seems to have gotten us to an interesting place: on the one hand, the question of what to do with George Zimmerman–did he have the right to be policing his neighborhood? did he have the right to carry and use a gun? did he have the right to suspect and pursue Trayvon?–brings us back to a question we’ve been asking repeatedly in the class… What should be the relationship between “police” and “society,” especially when we consider the use of force/power/gewalt? Should they be fully integral things, so that there’s no distinct institution of policing? Should there be an absolute distinction, so that only a small community can claim the right to police power? If the answer is somewhere in the middle, how would that work?
On the other hand, we’ve also been circulating around the question of freedom and security, norms and rights. Was George Zimmerman policing legitimately when we acted upon his suspicions, regardless of any evidence of law-breaking? Should the goal, the ends, of policing be the maintaince of community norms at the expense of individual liberty, or is a technocratic focus on law enforcement and civil rights the necessary priority of a democratic police force?
Anyone have any thoughts on how we can use some of the ideas and/or authors from this course to help us answer some of these questions?