Policing and the Construction of Racialized Groups and Social Control in the Americas

The proposed activity intends to be a Regular Session, composed of up to five presentations, of 20 minutes each.

This session aims to comparatively discuss the relationship between racial and ethnic formations and State institutions of social control – notably the police. We are particularly interested in American countries that were places to which vast contingents of people of African origin were subjected to forced migration and enslavement.

The periods following the end of African enslavement throughout the Americas often incorporated a continuation of intense social control of Black people either by criminalization, legal segregation, and/or through other forms of social control that maintained the surveillance of Blackness.

Moving beyond that, we also intend to open up a comparative discussion of the racialization and ethnicization processes to which indigenous communities were also subjected. Also, we ponder: how was the racialization of other groups informed by policing institutions as they carried out the imperatives of settlerism and theft of labor?

We welcome presentations that draw from either historical or contemporary analyzes. We seek contributions with varying conceptual frameworks, methods, approaches, subjects, and objects that relate to how policing institutions have been central actors in broader categorization, racialization, and racialized surveillance processes.