Staging Vision, Screening Others: Performance Paradigms for Police Practices

Christina Aushana
Communication
UC San Diego

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary engagement with police training and police vision in a time of ever-increasing speculation and critique concerning spectacles of police violence. Evermore subject to the camera’s scrutiny – and a scrutinizing public – the political stakes for contemporary policing include contending with and being answerable to its own visibility and visualizing tactics. Melding archival film work and performance ethnography methods, this project examines sites where policing is staged and performed, from the “back stage” of the on-duty patrol vehicle to the screened performances of Hollywood cinema. By bringing the screening practices of patrol officers under ethnographic analysis, “Staging Vision, Screening Others” argues that ethnography’s attunement to the unnamed and unknown can offer policing as a lens to reflect on its own profiling practices in the field. In this way, the dissertation foregrounds methods that the ethnographic researcher and police officer share in pursuit and performance of their objects of inquiry. Finally, the dissertation proposes that approaching performance as a theoretical mode for examining police work, and as a method for collaborating with officers and community activists in pursuit of more reflexive, culturally-aware approaches to everyday policing, opens police methods up to the critique and imaginations of policed communities.