I recently gave a “Lunch and Learn” talk for the Washtenaw County League of Women Voters on the topic of “Policing, Justice, and Community: An Anthropological Perspective” in which I outline why I think anthropological studies of policing can be helpful for thinking through some of the larger issues associated with policing today
I’ve finally been reading bits and pieces of Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, which, I’ve been doing as part of a larger project to imagine the end of policing.
I had been meaning to do this for a while, but I was recently inspired her performance as discussant at a double panel at the American Anthropological Association Meetings I was a part of, honoring Aihwa Ong. There were many wonderful moments there (one tidbit: Haraway, who became mega-famous for her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” declared that “Aihwa taught me more about cyborgs than anyone else.” She was especially inspired by the complex entanglements of women and machinery in Ong’s first book, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline) but it was actually one word that she kept using that stuck with me: critter. Continue reading Donna Haraway’s “Critters”
On September 28th I will be giving a talk entitled “Electric Burns: attending the microphysics of police power” sponsored by the University of Cincinnati’s Department of Anthropology Colloquium and Taft Research Center
Postscript to Of Heroes and Polemics: ‘The Policeman’ in Urban Ethnography This piece had a long gestation. The earliest version of this article was written in 2002, while I was a graduate student …
Source: 2015 Virtual Edition: Kevin Karpiak
The AAA Meetings were a wonderful flurry of activity that I’m just now recovering from, however one thing slipped under my radar while it was happening: my new article, co-authored with Paul Mutsaers and Jennie Simpson, on “The Anthropology of Police as Public Anthropology” is now available for early viewing*. The hard-copy version of the article is set to appear in the December issue of the journal American Anthropologist. This should be the first in a flurry of exciting things coming in the next semester or so, so keep an eye out!
*I’d prefer you download the article via Wiley’s site, if you have access through your home institution or Anthrosource. If not, however, you an find a copy I’ve uploaded onto Academia.edu
My article in PoLAR, Of Heroes and Polemics: “The Policeman” in Urban Ethnography, has been recognized as one of the “most-discussed” in the Anthrosource catalog, and is currently open-access
See more via Open Access Articles from the American Anthropological Association.
Panel to be submitted for the American Ethnological Society & Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Spring Meeting Chicago, Illinois April 11-13, 2013
A significant strain of scholarship on the anthropology of ethics suggests that, since the Enlightenment, ethical thought in the West has been reduced to sheer will to power. A key point of evidence for this claim has been the reliance on bureaucratic forms of administration, which are highlighted as examples of alienating “anti-politics” machines of indifference. This panel hopes to challenge that broad understanding of the role of ethical thought within the contemporary world by using sensitive ethnographic accounts of bureaucratic praxis to explore how ethical challenges are confronted across a variety of contexts. The goal is to use these accounts in order to open up a conversation in which anthropologists might more adequately attend to moments of ethical problematization; moments that offer concrete opportunity for ethical refiguration and, therefore, ethical thought within contemporary political forms.
If you are interested in participating in the panel, please email a proposed paper title and abstract of no more than 250 words to Dr. Kevin Karpiak (kkarpiak@emich.edu) by Tuesday, January 22nd.
Next week I’ll be heading off to Germany for a conference on Police History at the University of Cologne. You can read more about it over at Anthropoliteia…
via Anthropoliteia: the anthropology of policing
Next week I’ll be heading off to Germany for a conference on Police History at the University of Cologne. You can read more about it over at Anthropoliteia, or through the clipped segment below
If anyone’s in the Chicagoland area next week, I’ll be presenting a draft of my upcoming article “Electric Burns: the banlieue riots and the problem of a post-social police in France” (see details below) so that all the smart people over at the University of Chicago’s Anthropology of Europe Workshop can comment on it and be otherwise helpful in its development.
Email me or Owen Kohl to get a draft of the article; it will be assumed you’ve read it beforehand.
Continue reading Next Up: “Electric Burns” at University of Chicago
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