The Moral World of the Police

WiSER invites you to a seminar by

Didier Fassin  (Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton)

The Moral World of the Police

Respondent: Kelly Gillespie (Anthropology, Wits University)

In France, as is also the case in other Western countries, most urban disorders have followed violent interactions between the youth and the police in disadvantaged neighborhoods generally composed of working-class families of immigrant origin or belonging to minorities. But, whereas these dramatic events have benefitted from a wide media coverage, the ordinary forms of policing remains largely unknown. During fifteen months, at the time of the 2005 riots, Didier Fassin has conducted an ethnographic study in one of the largest French precincts, in the Paris region, sharing the life of a station and cruising with the dreaded anti-crime squads. His study reveals invisible expressions of violence and unrecognized forms of discrimination against minority youngsters, undocumented immigrants and Roma people, and explores the social conditions that make them possible and tolerable, notably decades of policies of urban segregation, racial stigmatization and economic marginalization. This presentation draws on Didier Fassin’s  book Enforcing Order. An Ethnography of Urban Policing, Cambridge: Polity Press, http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745664798(forthcoming August 2013)

Thursday, 23^rd May 2013
13h15

WISER Seminar Room, 
6th Floor, Richard Ward Building,
East Campus, Wits University

Professor Didier Fassin will be hosted at the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS), at Wits University, as an AW Mellon Distinguished Visiting Scholar during May and June 2013.