Paper Short Abstract:

How does vision shape the experience and possibility of urban space? Tracing the premises and consequences of seeing and being seen by the state, this paper addresses urban bordering by reflecting on an ongoing social action/research collaboration on racial profiling and policing in Italy.

Paper Abstract:

This paper traces how police encounters radically shape the experience and possibility of urban space. Addressing emerging debates in Italy around racial profiling in police work, the paper focuses specifically on vision, and the premises and consequences of seeing and being seen – noticed, addressed, scrutinised – by the state. Connecting academic and activist work around everyday bordering with critical engagements with the phenomenology and racial politics of sight, the paper reflects on the intersecting fields of ‘skilled visions’ (Grasseni 2007) operating and defining the urban landscape in a provincial town of northern Italy run by an explicitly anti-migrant local administration. The paper draws on the ongoing work of ‘Progetto Yaya,’ a social action/research collaboration on racial profiling and racist policing in Italy, born from the migrant-led collection of testimonies of police encounters in town. Reflecting on the possibilities and challenges of collaborative research in a context of heightened policing and violent horizons of ‘security,’ the paper begins to draw out the power of sight to define and transform the urban landscape.