'What's Culture Got Do With It? Reintroducing Policing as a Cultural Institution'

  • Lambros Fatsis (Presenter)

Activity: External talk or presentationInvited talk

Description

Policing is conventionally understood and mythologised as a crime-fighting institution that exists to ensure public safety. Contrary to such rosy, misleading and factually inaccurate portrayals of what policing is and does, this presentation approaches the historical mission and function of policing as fundamentally cultural. Drawing on a political understanding of culture, policing will be reintroduced as an instrument for suppressing Black cultural expression throughout the African diaspora, from the era of colonial slavery to the present day. Such rethinking of policing as a governing logic of state-sanctioned, racial(ised) criminalisation, encourages a decolonial approach to police scholarship and recasts the police as guardians of a social and political order that is marked by racial hierarchies, whose roots lie in the imperial-colonial ideology that created racism, “race” and policing in the first place.
Period3 Mar 2022