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This paper addresses how black communities in the urban periphery Greater Lisbon, Portugal ,engage with and confront police violence and different modalities of policing, by developing counter-narratives through music, graffiti, and Black cinema that demand racial justice and safe communities.

Paper long abstract

Over the years, peripheral communities, anti-racist activists, social movements, the media, international organisations, artists and academics have published articles, news items and reports on police violence in Portugal, particularly against Black and Roma populations. Many of these actors have repeatedly reported different levels of police violence, criticising anti-black racist logics, legal-criminal configurations and neoliberal arrangements concealed behind the liberal maxim that policing serves to protect people and is, in essence, a device for maintaining law and order. Based on a longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork on predatory policing in many neighbourhoods of Greater Lisbon, I discuss how Black individuals and communities have engaged with and confronted police violence, constructing counter-narratives through music, graffiti, and Black cinema, demanding racial justice and communities safe from state violence.

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In gentrifying neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, surveillance app Citizen is reimagined to track and record the police as a form of counter-surveillance during protests. Through the lens of technoskepticism, this paper explores ambivalent practices of surveillance that mediate between care and control.

Paper long abstract

Citizen is a live crime and safety tracking app operational across US cities. Citizen scrapes data from 911 calls and police scanners to find incidences that are relevant to “public safety”. It also utilises user-recorded footage, as users near a crime, fire or accident, are prompted to ‘go live’ and film unfolding events. This is a form of lateral surveillance, in which users are encouraged to record their neighbours and unknown others on the street.

Rather, in gentrifying neighbourhoods of Brooklyn, New York City, my research found that women, queer and Latina New Yorkers use Citizen to document, track and record the police at protests. By refusing to perform lateral surveillance on their fellow neighbours, my interlocutors instead turn their gaze back at authority as a form of counter-surveillance and as a means of protest mobilisation. However, digital technologies produce ambivalence and Citizen is no exception. Many of my interlocutors express their concerns about racial profiling, fear-mongering and vigilantism on the app. And yet, they still use Citizen in innovative ways, to watch out for rather than watch over. I conceptualise such ambivalence through the lens of technoskepticism (DISCO Network, 2025), a critical perspective on the use of technology, exploring the mediatory space between refusal and possibility and between care and control. This paper examines how surveillance technology is skeptically reimagined to work for communities. This is essential in the context of the U.S. and the prevalence of police brutality, the terror of ICE on the streets, and rapid gentrification.

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Even under a semi-civilian government in 20, Myanmar activists faced digital surveillance. Digital rights activists countered this with their own monitoring while balancing it with accountability. The paper addresses their struggles to remain accountable within and beyond seeing one another.

Paper long abstract

The years 2011-2021, before Myanmar’s military started a new coup to steer the country’s politics more directly, are often associated with liberalisation. Yet, people were hiding from “special branch”, a section of the police. The semi-civilian government in power after 2015 established a social media monitoring group which sat in an ambiguous position, keeping their eyes on alleged hate speech as well as allegedly engaging in surveillance.

Digital rights activists likewise engaged in monitoring during this time. Some wanted to unmask government agents and “bad actors” in online spaces. Others wanted to see those actors without being seen by them. Both saw the need to be accountable to one another, particularly amongst the activists. Even though they engaged in techniques not too different from policing, they imagined a co-operative way of working together.

This paper explores their ways of seeing, feeling and grasping what it means to be responsible to one another in a dual setting which took sight as the guide to knowledge, namely both surveillance practices and social scientific knowledge production. It tells of their failures to talk to one another but also how they kept considerate silence to keep their relations safe and free.

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Based on ethnographic research with Rio de Janeiro military police officers, this paper examines internal counter-narratives articulated by academically socialized interlocutors that address, among other issues, racial profiling and interests that produce and sustain high levels of police lethality

Paper long abstract

This paper presents part of the research developed within a doctoral thesis, defended in 2025, which examines the naturalization of police lethality in the Polícia Militar do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro Military Police) — one of the most lethal police forces in the world. Fieldwork was conducted with military police officers through activities, projects, and long-standing collaborative relationships between the INCT-InEAC research group at Fluminense Federal University of Niterói (Rio de Janeiro) and local public security institutions. The research unfolded within a singular ethnographic context in which some interlocutors had undergone processes of academic socialization — often in sociology or anthropology — and actively mobilized representations, counter-narratives, and reflexive perspectives on policing practices. As the interlocutors themselves emphasized, such perspectives are far from representative of the police force as a whole, yet they actively tension hegemonic discourses produced within public security institutions. Drawing on ethnographic data and in-depth interviews, the paper examines and discusses these counter-narratives from within the police, foregrounding the viewpoints of those who perform policing as a daily practice. These narratives critically address, among other issues, racial profiling, the historically constituted roles of the Military Police in Brazil, and the interests at stake — at multiple levels — that in practice guide, sustain, and endemically reproduce a public security system marked by extraordinarily high levels of police lethality.

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Critical research resists the “border knowledge economy” by renaming, documenting, and counter-seeing migration violence. Migrants, scholars, activists, and journalists cultivate autonomous practices—archiving, testimony, informal platforms—that reveal what states and agencies render invisible.

Paper long abstract

Policing and border enforcement rely on both direct coercion and the power to define accepted knowledge about borders. This paper examines how information sharing, research and education can resist the “border knowledge economy”—the reactionary network of states, iNGOs, agencies, and academic partners that frame migration through programs, funding, and technocratic discourse. Drawing on examples from Southeastern Europe and the EU periphery, we explore how scholars, activists, and journalists cultivate modes of refusal: rejecting state-aligned terminology, declining compromised funding, and building autonomous spaces for documentation, political education, and collaborative analysis. Practices include community archiving, public testimony, people’s tribunals, blogs, and informal platforms. These efforts foreground what is rendered invisible by dominant institutions and create ethical, politically responsive ways of knowing and seeing.

We highlight how the capacity to rename, document, and voice depends on positionality and politics relative to the border regime. Naming practices—terms like “pushbacks,” “detention,” or “disappearance”— can expose the violence often concealed by technocratic registers. Research that refuses reproduces alternative lexicons, political imaginaries, and solidarities, offering forms of counter-seeing at the receiving end of coercive policing and surveillance. By tracing how knowledge production itself can resist epistemic and bureaucratic power, this paper contributes to understanding movement-led, collective, and ethical practices of witnessing, documenting, and counter-surveillance.

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This paper examines “Death in Custody” — a digital archive documenting deaths of racialized people from police violence in German — as a practice of dark sousveillance that challenges epistemic hierarchies and creates alternative knowledge about racist police violence.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how civil society actors in Germany use digital counter-archives to challenge the epistemic asymmetry between police testimony and community knowledge of racist police violence. Focusing on the “Death in Custody” archive — created by an alliance of anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-repression groups — which documents deaths of racialized people in custody or from police violence, I ask what forms of counter-seeing emerge when marginalized communities create their own records of such state violence. Drawing on Simone Browne's concept of ‘dark sousveillance’, defined as practices that reverse surveillance technologies to document and expose state violence, I analyze how this archive operates as a form of ‘watching back’. I argue that this archive reverses the racialized surveillance gaze historically directed at Black and racialized communities, thereby transforming tools of control into instruments of accountability. By employing visual ethnography to analyze the archive’s images and maps, I trace how digital witnessing is constituted through specific relational assemblages of activists, platforms, and infrastructural arrangements. This counter-archive, I contend, not only documents incidents absent from official records but also enact a form of epistemic resistance, thus creating alternative knowledge practices that contest whose testimony counts as evidence.

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Based on an ethnography of the police in north India, this paper parses what the police call ‘parasites.’ Parasites can include lawyers, journalists, and viral videos. They can shapeshift and morph, and keep a check on the police who, in turn, fear the parasites' watchful gaze and presence.

Paper long abstract

In India, a range of brokers, fixers, and middlemen negotiate access to all levels of the state. However, little is known about how state-level bureaucrats respond to these para-state actors. Based on an ethnography of the police in a small city in Uttar Pradesh, India, this paper parses what the police call ‘parasites.’ Parasites, the police argue, thrive on vulnerabilities of both the state and their commercial clients, especially in the digital era. This paper shows how the police fear ‘being acted upon’ by the parasites. These parasites can include lawyers, journalists, viral videos, and even the jinns. They can shapeshift and morph, and in the eyes of police, become indiscernible from one another. This paper shows how the police fear the parasites' watchful gaze and presence, highlighting their inability to accurately assess threats to their power. Overall, the paper makes two contributions: one is that it shows how the police operate under a fear of threats they cannot fully comprehend. Second, it highlights how the brokers keep a check on the police.

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In regenerating urban spaces, so-perceived ‘security problems’ are increasingly addressed through surveillance cameras. Drawing on fieldwork in a stigmatised neighbourhood in Antwerp, this paper explores how Moroccan-background young men collectively respond to these cameras’ racialising gaze.

Paper long abstract

In regenerating postcolonial cities, youths hanging out in public space are increasingly regarded as a ‘security problem’. This is particularly the case when it concerns young men of colour in underprivileged, densely populated neighbourhoods, for whom – being excluded from mainstream leisure activities – a square or street corner often serves as a ‘backyard’. To address these men’s so-perceived threatening and ‘nuisance’-causing presences, governmental bodies increasingly employ surveillance cameras. This paper explores how these men experience, respond to, and navigate these cameras, drawing on fieldwork with Moroccan-background youths in the Belgian city of Antwerp.

Antwerp has – with 819 cameras – Belgium’s most extensive police camera network, concentrated around ‘high-risk’ areas. I zoom in on one such area, the neighbourhood of Borgerhout, where many young men of Moroccan descent hang out in public space. While most Borgerhout residents feel secure/unaffected by street cameras, for these youths, the cameras generate profound affects of insecurity: they are white and un/inhuman ‘angry eyes’, specifically targeting them. First, I demonstrate how the cameras thereby ‘re-interpellate’ them as a stigmatised-cum-racialised subject – a ‘Moroccan’. Then, drawing on mapping activities that civil society partners and I conducted with these young men, I illustrate the various ‘care-full’ tactics of counter-surveillance they have developed to navigate the cameras. I show how they have crafted, both individually and collectively, ‘tactics of watching’ and ‘tactics of moving’ in public space as a way to care for one another and protect one another from the disrupting, dehumanising, and racialising camera gaze.

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Based on ethnography of Roma–police encounters in Lithuania, I theorize “genuine racism” as ordinary police talk enabled by normalized antigypsyism and racial common sense. I explore the ethical dilemma of “watching the police” when they expect validation.

Paper long abstract

For many Roma community members mistreatment by law enforcement and the routine use of physical and symbolic violence are part of everyday reality. Yet in Lithuania this remains only fragmentarily addressed by scholars and policy actors, often treated as marginal or even non-existent.

In this paper, I draw on ongoing ethnographic research on Roma–police encounters and racialization mechanisms in Lithuania, focusing specifically on the ethical and emotional dilemmas of doing research with police officers. In a social context where antigypsyism is deeply entrenched and widely normalized, racist attitudes and misconduct toward Roma rarely become objects of public scrutiny or moral reflection. This produces what I call “genuine racism”: encounters in which police officers speak openly and confidently in dehumanizing terms about Roma people, often taking for granted it as a common sense, treating such narratives as self-evident, reasonable and even professional. These “genuinely racist” revelations become a key site where police authority, “racial common sense” (Hall, 1981) and institutional legitimacy are reproduced through ordinary speech and interactions.

Finally, I ask what it means to “watch the police” when the police expect “the watcher” to validate their worldview. How such interactions complicate my position of both a researcher and a moral citizen?

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This paper explores how police oversight in Kenya is experienced from the receiving end of police violence. Introducing oversight overload, it shows how proliferating accountability mechanisms disperse responsibility and dull the political force of complaint-making.

Paper long abstract

Dominant discourses of police reform in Kenya frame oversight as a technical solution to police violence, promising transparency and accountability. From the receiving end of police power, however, these reforms are often experienced less as protection than as an opaque and unsettling extension of institutional authority. In this paper, I examine how communities, complainants, and oversight actors encounter, interpret, and attempt to navigate the proliferating architectures of police oversight that have emerged along Kenya’s police reform trajectory.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nairobi between 2017 and 2018, I focus on how cases of police (mis)conduct are seen, documented, and pursued through multiple oversight channels. I analyse two interconnected domains: investigations into police violence and the lodging and management of complaints against police officers. For those subjected to police coercion, engaging oversight mechanisms becomes a form of counter-seeing—an effort to render police violence legible, actionable, and accountable. Yet this work unfolds within a fragmented landscape of state and non-state institutions with overlapping mandates and competing logics. I introduce the concept of oversight overload to describe how this multiplicity generates uncertainty, disperses responsibility, and frequently frustrates attempts to make police violence visible. Rather than enhancing accountability, oversight overload often obscures lines of authority, exhausts complainants, and dulls the political force of complaint-making itself. Attending to the embodied, affective, and practical labour of pursuing justice, the paper argues that oversight is not merely an institutional arrangement but a lived and contested practice of sensing and engaging the state.