Policing as a practice of categorisation – Reciprocal ascriptions in the control of public spaces

• Applicant: Dr. Jan Beek
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404113487

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement and the revelation of far-right online chats in several German police units, racism has become a key issue with which the police in Germany is associated. When conflicts between youths and police officers broke out at so-called ‘hotspots’ in 2021 and 2022, they often were discussed in the context of migration or in reference to racist police practices. This project will study how actors reciprocally categorise each other during everyday policing and how these categories affect practices. With this approach, the project will engage and expand public and scholarly discourse by focussing on not only the police but also the municipal public order offices (Ordnungsamt), private security organisations, business people, residents and the youths themselves as powerful actors, all of whom are engaged either in policing or in attempts to resist policing. Moreover, the research approach does not presuppose which categories of difference are most relevant. While actors certainly culturalise, ethnicise or racialise each other in these interactions, they also ascribe age, class, deviancy, gender, legal classifications, regional descent, religion, speech proficiency and other categories. The latter set of implicit factors has as much impact on practices as the former, and both are inextricably linked. The research design operationalises these approaches through ethnographic research in two ‘hotspots’ – designated as such by actors and the media – in the Rhine-Main area. The fieldwork will be characterised by actor groups who are clearly delineated, mistrust each other and have asymmetric power relations. Therefore, the study willbe done by a team in which each researcher is the participant observer of her/his respective group. By further developing this collaborative ethnographic approach, the project also will advance the methodological toolbox of social anthropology. ‘Policing as a practice of categorisation’ aims to innovatively study a topic intensely discussed by the public and academia, thereby contributing to research on the police, security, the state, migration and racism. The project has the potential to develop – or ‘anthropologise’ – these fields of research by relying on concepts that originate in research in the Global South; by incorporating an ethnographic sensibility that interprets practices in context, emic terminologies and multiperspectivity; and by assuming a non-normative position of epistemilogical equistance that does not attempt to resolve contradictions but rather identifies them.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Thomas Bierschenk