* Room 3021, 3rd level of the Terrace building (Hamadrega) – see map

Abstract

This presentation considers several common understandings of “institutional racism,” and ultimately propounds an understanding that foregrounds institutional, legal and professional knowledge as a prominent domain through which racism is enacted and by which it persists. To do this, I focus on a recent study in which my co-authors and I show how routine policing is conscripted into the project of maintaining and reproducing spatial racism in urban settings through an intersecting set of macro-level processes and micro-interactional practices. Our analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with over 40 police officers during 20 ride-alongs in the Western U.S. identifies person- and place-specific heuristic classifications that police officers rely on to manage routine encounters. We find that officers use membership categorization devices to sort people and places in the city into distinct categories (e.g., nice places, normal people, the projects, and people in the projects), which, in turn, prefigure different orientations-to-action at the start of and throughout their encounters with the public.  Our findings provide an empirical basis for thinking of professional police knowledge, and of institutionalized knowledge more generally, as encoding systemic racism in routine policing, rather than being a break from it. Ultimately, this understanding of institutional racism also directs us to forms of action and institution-making that are oriented by local and community-grounded notions of security, health, and social life. 

See here about Dr. Gil Rothschild Elyassi