Policing Race, Ethnicity and Culture: Ethnographic Perspectives Across Europe - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1526165589 ISBN 13: 9781526165589

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2023

Synopsis

How to deal with differences based on culture, ethnicity and race, has become a key issue of policing. This edited collected explores everyday, often mundane interactions between police officers and migrantised actors in European countries and asks how both sides deal with perceived differences. The contributions reflect that such differences are not just ‘out there’ but are being situationally (re-)produced in police-citizen encounters. By taking a comparative approach, the book develops a distinctly European perspective on these questions. The book contains 12 ethnographies from ten European countries, based on new and often innovative empirical research, two theoretical contributions, an introduction and a postface. -- .

About this title

About the Author

Jan Beek is the leader of the research project ‘Police-translations’ in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Thomas Bierschenk is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Annalena Kolloch is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Bernd Meyer is Professor for Intercultural Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

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From the Back Cover

How the police deal with difference - in terms of race, ethnicity or culture - has become a key issue for policing. Public discourse is dominated by shocking news events, many of them in the US, but also in Europe. The book investigates everyday interactions between police officers and citizens, often those labelled as 'migrants', asking how such differences are brought up and in what way they shape these encounters - with findings that do not fit neatly into the highly polarised contemporary public discourse.

Taking an ethnographic approach, contributors to this volume study the perspectives and rationalities of both police officers and migrantised citizens, with a keen awareness of the asymmetries of power and knowledge. This entails exploring the practices, discourses and beliefs of actors with whom social scientists do not always easily sympathise: police officers. Such a positioning, while often ethically challenging, is unavoidable for a nuanced understanding of policing.

Public discourse and scholarly work on policing have frequently been dominated by news and events from the US. The detailed ethnographic descriptions in this volume highlight how police practices and the practices of othering vary widely, even within Europe, and that the unique trajectories of modern US history may not provide a productive framework to understand the policing of differences elsewhere. By studying these questions in ten European countries, each with a particular history of policing and othering, the book contributes to the development of a comparative and distinctly European perspective on policing.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1526165589
• ISBN 13: 9781526165589
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Beek Jan, Bierschenk Thomas, Kolloch Annalena, Meyer Bernd