The NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar Research Group, in conjunction with the Centre for the Americas and the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University Belfast, invite you to the closing event of a seminar series examining the complex relationship between race, class, and policing in the Americas.
In this roundtable discussion (via Zoom) moderated by Patrick Deer (NYU), Sonia Das (NYU), Gabriella Johnson (NYU), Stuart Schrader (Johns Hopkins), and Nikhil Singh (NYU) will share their research on race, policing, mass incarceration and prison abolitionism in the United States and beyond. The panelists will explore how research undertaken and disseminated in different contexts (both within and outside of universities in the wake of Black Lives Matter and other protest movements) and across diverse approaches (policing, carceral studies, technology, prison education, literary and cultural studies, and scholar-activism) can contribute to raising critical awareness of police violence and mass incarceration.
Panelists:
Sonia Das is Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at New York University and Co-Editor-In-Chief of the flagship Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. She is the author of Linguistic Rivalries: Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco Conflicts (Oxford UP, 2016), a study of the migration and diasporic experiences of Tamil-speaking Indians and Sri Lankans since the 1840s. Her current research examines how the big data of body-worn camera and predictive policing prepetuates racial inequalities in U.S. law enforcement.
Gabriella I. Johnson is a doctoral candidate in English and American literature at New York University, where her research and teaching focuses on African American literature, Black feminist theories, and prison abolitionist thought. She is currently writing her dissertation on 20th-century African American women's fiction as a prison abolitionist imagination.
Stuart Schrader is Associate Research Professor in the Center for Africana Studies and Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (U of California Press, 2019) which looks at the relationship between US projections of power overseas and the rise of the carceral state at home. His new project examines the political activities of police in the United States since the 1960s, via professional organizations and unions.
Nikhil Singh is Professor of Social and Analysis and History at New York University and Faculty Director of NYU's Prison Education Program. A historian of race, empire, and culture in the 20th-century United States, Singh is the author of Race and America's Long War (U of California Press, 2017) and the award-winning, Black Is a Country: race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard UP, 2004). A new book Exceptional Empire: Race, Colonialism and the Origins of US Globalism is in-progress, and forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at New York University and co-organizer of the NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar research group. He published a scholarly book about war writing and war culture in World War II, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature (Oxord UP, 2009; paperback ed. 2016). His current book project is We Are All Embedded: Understanding American War Culture Since 9/11.
