From Ethnography to Ethno-Graphic: Representing the Work of the Police

During the 15 months between the death of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore and subsequent unrest in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois in 2005, and the deaths of the adolescents Moushin and Laramy and subsequent uprising in another Paris suburb, Villiers-le-Bel, in 2007, Dider Fassin conducted research on police work in poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris. His research focused on the everyday life of the dreaded anti-crime squads, ordinary racial discrimination and the banality of violence.

This research was initially translated into a book ("Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing," Polity, 2013), as can be expected from an ethnography, and more recently, into comics that comprise an ethno-graphic ("La force de l’ordre. Une enquête ethno-graphique," Seuil/Delcourt, 2020).

Fassin's lecture will reflect on the variations in representation of this research as it related to the chosen form, and on their echoes in the public sphere as events involving police abuses unfold.

Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and Annual Chair in Public Health, Collège de France, is an anthropologist and a sociologist who has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa and France. Trained as a physician in internal medicine and public health, he dedicated his early research to medical anthropology, focusing on the AIDS epidemic and health inequalities. He later developed the field of critical moral anthropology, which explores the historical, social, and political signification of moral forms involved in everyday judgment and action, as well as in the making of national policies and international relations.

DISCUSSANTS
Aslı Ü. Bâli is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Faculty Director of the UCLA Law Promise Institute for Human Rights. Her principal scholarly interests lie in two areas: public international law—including human rights law and the law of the international security order—and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on the Middle East.

Aomar Boum is Associate Professor at UCLA Department of Anthropology. He is a socio-cultural anthropologist with a historical bent concerned with the social and cultural representation of and political discourse about religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East and North Africa.


Organizers: UCLA International Institute; UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies; Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy

Co-sponsors: Center for Social Medicine and the Humanities (Semel Institute), David Geffen School of Medicine; Global Health Program, David Geffen School of Medicine; UCLA Department of Anthropology

 Download Podcast

Duration: 01:42:45

 Download Podcast

Duration: 01:42:45