No longer merely “good to think”

The new anthropology of police as a mode of critical thought

Bibliographic Data

ID12586641
AuthorsKevin Karpiak (Eastern Michigan University), Kevin G Karpiak (0000-0002-8347-7757, Eastern Michigan University, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume20
Issue4
Pages419-429
Publication date2016-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheoretical Criminology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1362-4806 • E-ISSN: 1461-7439
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1362480616659807
OpenAlexW2549202325
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited63

Images of police, punishment, and crime were central to the work of several of the key thinkers of the 20th century: the interpolative hail of the policeman for Althusser; the violence of the policeman in the shadow of law’s excess for Benjamin; the figure of the panopticon and, later, of police as the administration of man internal to the State for Foucault (to name just a few). Police, crime, and punishment were useful to consider a wide swath of issues including subjectivity, inequality, sovereignty, power, and text. If police have been such a productive tool through which to think, how does the emergence of anthropological research projects focused squarely on such practitioners stand to change that thought? Pushing this question more broadly, how does studying such subjects “head on” reshape how we reflect on the larger issues in critical theory today? This collection of articles will attempt to address such questions through ethnographic accounts that interrogate the limits and alternative possibilities for thinking about police. In the process these articles will push us to reexamine the practices of policing at the heart of collective life in such a way that challenges not only our understanding of such critical theorists but also places critical police studies at the center of our understanding of what it means to be human today

Criminology · Critical theory · Epistemology · Ethnography · Michel foucault · Panopticon · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Punishment (psychology · Shadow (psychology · Sociology · Sovereignty · Subjectivity · Anthropology · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Law · Policing Practices and Perceptions · Psychology · Social Psychology

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