Daanika Gordon
Biographic Data
| ID | 75849 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daanika Gordon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daanika |
| FAMILY NAME | Gordon |
| SIGNATURE | GORDON D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tufts University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2754-4676 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Political boundary objects in debates over police funding
Following the racial reckoning of 2020, officials in local governments faced demands for police transformation and antiracist action. Yet a variety of constraints hindered their ability to fundamentally change policing. I examine how city councilors navigated this terrain through the case of a progressive city where officials made commitments to reimagine public safety, followed by reinvestments in police funding. Drawing on video footage from ci…
The Boundaries of Twenty-first-Century Policing
Three new books by sociologists— The Policing Machine by Tony Cheng, The Minneapolis Reckoning by Michelle Phelps, and The Danger Imperative by Michael Sierra-Arévalo—offer us a view into the state of US policing leading up to and following the racial reckoning of 2020. I read these books together through the lens of boundary work, examining what they tell us about the various projects that seek to maintain, expand, or change police jurisdiction …
The Bureaucratic Dissociation of Race in Policing
Policing has long been implicated in state projects that construct race and racial inequality, yet many officers maintain that their work is colorblind. Burgeoning theories of racialized organizations offer a means of analyzing the processes that mediate such relationships between state racial projects and the ideologies of individuals. I suggest an extension of the racialized organizations framework that specifically considers the functions and …
Co-opting 'Danger' in Specialized Media for the Police
Widespread protests for racial justice during the summer of 2020 raised foundational questions about the role of the police in U.S. society. In this article, the authors analyze an underexplored body of media representations that perform ideological work in this context. The authors examine specialized media targeting a law enforcement audience, asking how news articles published on the Web site Police1 represented the police profession and the p…
Evaluating and Improving Department Racial Climate through Action Research
This essay describes a learning experience that utilized participatory action research to improve the racial climate of a sociology department at a predominantly White institution. Through systematic inquiry, we developed initiatives and proposed recommendations to create more welcoming, supportive, and affirming environments for students of color and students from other historically oppressed communities. We see our work as a model that develops…
Police redistricting reforms and urban governance
Police redistricting reforms are surprisingly understudied. While many understand redistricting in other realms as a mechanism of social inclusion and exclusion, police redistricting is often overlooked as merely technocratic. We argue that, in fact, police redistricting reforms are substantively and theoretically important because they articulate urban policy amid the pressures of neoliberal governance. Redistricting defines the functions and ac…
Linking Racial Classification, Racial Inequality, and Racial Formation
Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship , by Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Mood, and Donald Haider-Markel, is an important piece of law and society scholarship that isolates investigatory police stops as an institutional practice with profound consequences for racial inequality. Pulled Over also speaks to scholarship on race and ethnicity by addressing an ongoing tension between a focus on the socially constructed nature of rac…
The Police as Place-Consolidators
Efforts to understand racial inequality in policing often focus on the micro-level, examining the situational dynamics of police-citizen encounters. This Article explores racial inequality in policing from another angle: it asks how the police organization responds to and further constructs the surrounding urban environment. I examine a police department’s move toward local and decentralized approaches, captured in a redistricting reform and subs…
The Family Framework in a Drug Treatment Court
Drug courts reflect an expanding effort to transform the state's response to drug crimes. Such programs merge punitive and therapeutic strategies in efforts to rehabilitate clients. The author takes the case of one drug court to elaborate on a set of institutional practices characterizing this mode of intervention. On the basis of ethnographic observation of the court's weekly review hearings, interviews with program professionals, and analysis o…
Daily Mobility in the Black-White Segregated City
As the overt institutional maintenance of black-white residential segregation declines, we can investigate its persistence by analyzing the racial projects of everyday life. Daily mobility-movement from place to place for the sake of routine activities-represents one such project. Daily mobility patterns reflect the material realities of uneven resource distribution across neighborhoods and unequal means of access across residents. Yet, daily mob…
The Police as Place-Consolidators
Efforts to understand racial inequality in policing often focus on the micro-level, examining the situational dynamics of police-citizen encounters. This Article explores racial inequality in policing from another angle: it asks how the police organization responds to and further constructs the surrounding urban environment. I examine a police department’s move toward local and decentralized approaches, captured in a redistricting reform and subs…
The Bureaucratic Dissociation of Race in Policing
Policing has long been implicated in state projects that construct race and racial inequality, yet many officers maintain that their work is colorblind. Burgeoning theories of racialized organizations offer a means of analyzing the processes that mediate such relationships between state racial projects and the ideologies of individuals. I suggest an extension of the racialized organizations framework that specifically considers the functions and …
Daily Mobility in the Black-White Segregated City
As the overt institutional maintenance of black-white residential segregation declines, we can investigate its persistence by analyzing the racial projects of everyday life. Daily mobility-movement from place to place for the sake of routine activities-represents one such project. Daily mobility patterns reflect the material realities of uneven resource distribution across neighborhoods and unequal means of access across residents. Yet, daily mob…
Co-opting 'Danger' in Specialized Media for the Police
Widespread protests for racial justice during the summer of 2020 raised foundational questions about the role of the police in U.S. society. In this article, the authors analyze an underexplored body of media representations that perform ideological work in this context. The authors examine specialized media targeting a law enforcement audience, asking how news articles published on the Web site Police1 represented the police profession and the p…
The Family Framework in a Drug Treatment Court
Drug courts reflect an expanding effort to transform the state's response to drug crimes. Such programs merge punitive and therapeutic strategies in efforts to rehabilitate clients. The author takes the case of one drug court to elaborate on a set of institutional practices characterizing this mode of intervention. On the basis of ethnographic observation of the court's weekly review hearings, interviews with program professionals, and analysis o…
Evaluating and Improving Department Racial Climate through Action Research
This essay describes a learning experience that utilized participatory action research to improve the racial climate of a sociology department at a predominantly White institution. Through systematic inquiry, we developed initiatives and proposed recommendations to create more welcoming, supportive, and affirming environments for students of color and students from other historically oppressed communities. We see our work as a model that develops…
Police redistricting reforms and urban governance
Police redistricting reforms are surprisingly understudied. While many understand redistricting in other realms as a mechanism of social inclusion and exclusion, police redistricting is often overlooked as merely technocratic. We argue that, in fact, police redistricting reforms are substantively and theoretically important because they articulate urban policy amid the pressures of neoliberal governance. Redistricting defines the functions and ac…
Linking Racial Classification, Racial Inequality, and Racial Formation
Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship , by Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Mood, and Donald Haider-Markel, is an important piece of law and society scholarship that isolates investigatory police stops as an institutional practice with profound consequences for racial inequality. Pulled Over also speaks to scholarship on race and ethnicity by addressing an ongoing tension between a focus on the socially constructed nature of rac…
The Family Framework in a Drug Treatment Court
Drug courts reflect an expanding effort to transform the state's response to drug crimes. Such programs merge punitive and therapeutic strategies in efforts to rehabilitate clients. The author takes the case of one drug court to elaborate on a set of institutional practices characterizing this mode of intervention. On the basis of ethnographic observation of the court's weekly review hearings, interviews with program professionals, and analysis o…
Daily Mobility in the Black-White Segregated City
As the overt institutional maintenance of black-white residential segregation declines, we can investigate its persistence by analyzing the racial projects of everyday life. Daily mobility-movement from place to place for the sake of routine activities-represents one such project. Daily mobility patterns reflect the material realities of uneven resource distribution across neighborhoods and unequal means of access across residents. Yet, daily mob…
Linking Racial Classification, Racial Inequality, and Racial Formation
Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship , by Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Mood, and Donald Haider-Markel, is an important piece of law and society scholarship that isolates investigatory police stops as an institutional practice with profound consequences for racial inequality. Pulled Over also speaks to scholarship on race and ethnicity by addressing an ongoing tension between a focus on the socially constructed nature of rac…
The Police as Place-Consolidators
Efforts to understand racial inequality in policing often focus on the micro-level, examining the situational dynamics of police-citizen encounters. This Article explores racial inequality in policing from another angle: it asks how the police organization responds to and further constructs the surrounding urban environment. I examine a police department’s move toward local and decentralized approaches, captured in a redistricting reform and subs…
Police redistricting reforms and urban governance
Police redistricting reforms are surprisingly understudied. While many understand redistricting in other realms as a mechanism of social inclusion and exclusion, police redistricting is often overlooked as merely technocratic. We argue that, in fact, police redistricting reforms are substantively and theoretically important because they articulate urban policy amid the pressures of neoliberal governance. Redistricting defines the functions and ac…
Co-opting 'Danger' in Specialized Media for the Police
Widespread protests for racial justice during the summer of 2020 raised foundational questions about the role of the police in U.S. society. In this article, the authors analyze an underexplored body of media representations that perform ideological work in this context. The authors examine specialized media targeting a law enforcement audience, asking how news articles published on the Web site Police1 represented the police profession and the p…
Evaluating and Improving Department Racial Climate through Action Research
This essay describes a learning experience that utilized participatory action research to improve the racial climate of a sociology department at a predominantly White institution. Through systematic inquiry, we developed initiatives and proposed recommendations to create more welcoming, supportive, and affirming environments for students of color and students from other historically oppressed communities. We see our work as a model that develops…
The Boundaries of Twenty-first-Century Policing
Three new books by sociologists— The Policing Machine by Tony Cheng, The Minneapolis Reckoning by Michelle Phelps, and The Danger Imperative by Michael Sierra-Arévalo—offer us a view into the state of US policing leading up to and following the racial reckoning of 2020. I read these books together through the lens of boundary work, examining what they tell us about the various projects that seek to maintain, expand, or change police jurisdiction …
The Bureaucratic Dissociation of Race in Policing
Policing has long been implicated in state projects that construct race and racial inequality, yet many officers maintain that their work is colorblind. Burgeoning theories of racialized organizations offer a means of analyzing the processes that mediate such relationships between state racial projects and the ideologies of individuals. I suggest an extension of the racialized organizations framework that specifically considers the functions and …
Political boundary objects in debates over police funding
Following the racial reckoning of 2020, officials in local governments faced demands for police transformation and antiracist action. Yet a variety of constraints hindered their ability to fundamentally change policing. I examine how city councilors navigated this terrain through the case of a progressive city where officials made commitments to reimagine public safety, followed by reinvestments in police funding. Drawing on video footage from ci…
Political science (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Criminology (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Policing Practices and Perceptions (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (5 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Psychology (4 works)