Short Abstract

How are watchers watched, how is power seen? This panel traces what is seen on the receiving end of police work, surveillance, and violence – and what is done to resist it.

Long Abstract

How are watchers watched, how is power seen?

Dominant discourses surrounding policing often evoke notions of protection and public service. However, for many, particularly those subjected to its more coercive actions and monitoring gaze, policing stands for something far more disturbing, the expression of an anarchic form of institutional authority (Lamb 2024) that demands critical scrutiny and resistance.

Addressing the polarised visions that organise police encounters, this panel focuses specifically on how and what is seen on the receiving end of police work, surveillance, and violence. How do communities organise to address and monitor their surveillance? How do individuals engage with, and heal from, the predictive and profiling gaze of law enforcement? What modelling of policing, if at all, do they envision for themselves? What kinds of embodied skills are developed to eschew the “white sight” (Mirzoeff 2023) of the police?

We welcome papers that engage ethnographically with questions of seeing and counter-seeing in the polarising worlds of police encounters. Themes may include (but not limited to!):

• embodied practices of seeing and eschewing police power

• racial profiling and counter-seeing

• counter-narratives and community-based policing

• alternative imaginaries of security rendering joy, agency and safety as co-constitutive

• community organising and cop-watch work on police accountability

• counter-surveillance practices, collectively organised or mobilised ad-hoc

• community research, unruly methods, and (in)visible “data” on police violence

• sensing the state and counter-seeing beyond ocularcentrism

We welcome papers from all ethnographic and regional space, as well as contributions from community and social action projects counter-watching the police.

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