Policing “conjugal order”: gender,hybridity and vernacular security in Fiji

ABSTRACT

This article develops a feminist critique of debate on hybrid forms of governance in global politics by demonstrating the gendered implications (and limitations) of hybridized approaches to security provision. The conceptual approach that frames my enquiry puts arguments advancing the benefits of multilayered and hybridized security into dialogue with ethnographic enquiry on “vernacular” security and feminist study of “conjugal order.” I contend that this conceptual approach is particularly productive for examining the gendered policing outcomes that can be produced in environments where vernacular influences – customary and religious – inflect prevailing idioms of security and order. To further defend this claim, I apply this conceptual approach to a case study of gender and policing in Fiji. Although there has been a strong state rhetoric of progressive reform on gender policy in this context, efforts to reform policing have been hamstrung by longstanding customary and religious discourses that emphasize the defense of conjugal norms as foundational to the achievement of order and safety. I show how this scenario has encouraged a practical policing of gender and sexuality that is restrictive for women generally and may expose particular groups of women to direct forms of insecurity and violence.     

Undercover policing and the spectre of ‘domestic extremism’: the covert surveillance of environmental activism in Britain

The spectre of environmental ‘domestic extremism’ has long been postulated by police leaders and security analysts in Britain. It is a narrative that has justified the commitment of enormous amounts of government resources towards police intelligence work directed at non-violent direct action campaigns. Most controversially, this has included the long-term infiltration of environmental (and other) activist groups by undercover police. This article provides a critical analysis of the justifications put forward in support of the covert surveillance of environmental activists in Britain. The paper proceeds by way of a single case study – a high profile, environmental direct action protest in the north of England – in order to reveal the levels of abuse, manipulation and deception at the basis of undercover protest policing. Through their court case, the activists involved with this action were able to obtain rare insights into the police authorisation documents for the undercover operation that had led to their arrests. An analysis of these documents provides us with a glimpse of the contradictory justifications given by senior police officers for infiltration – now under scrutiny by a public inquiry.     

Border Scans: Sovereignty,Surveillance and the Customs Service in Ghana

This article explores the relationship between surveillance techniques and the production of sovereign statehood in an effort to track the day-to-day practices through which state authority is constituted in the context of globalization. This article explicitly probes the processes through which new forms of sovereignty come into being within the life of the state. It takes as its point of departure the operations of Ghana's Customs Service, a body charged with policing the nation's frontiers and collecting the bulk of state revenue. Contrasting the work of a multinational firm contracted by the government of Ghana to carry out Customs duties and the conventional roles of Ghanaian Customs officers, this article examines the ways in which the manifold technologies of neo-liberalism (from contractual forms and modes of accountability, to the apparatuses of surveillance) redefine the capacities, authority, and imagination of both state and self, held by state agents. Here we see a sovereignty that is increasingly derived outside of the state even as the play of sovereign power is intensified and deeply diffused within it.     

The Global War on Terror and Automatic License Plate Recognition

En sciences sociales un produit un vaste corpus de recherche concernant la pratique et la politique des Systèmes de Surveillance en Circuit Fermé (CCTV). La recherche a cependant négligé les CCTV automatisés et informatisés. Je m'adresse à ces formes de culture de la surveillance au moyen d'un point de vue institutionnel d'explorer ce qui a été appelé de reconnaissance automatique des plaques d'immatriculation (ALPR). En retraçant la manière dont les plans d'un système de surveillance Warzone sont utilisés comme une ressource dans les pratiques policières américaines, je trouve qu'ils ont tous deux impliquent un positionnement géo‐des véhicules, l'analyse de l'apparence des véhicules, et en minimisant le travail de l'analyse des plaques d'immatriculation. Je montre comment ces liens sont obscurcies, puis terminera par une discussion de trois implications de ce point de vue institutionnel sur ALPR. Social science has produced a fine body of research on the practices and politics of closed‐circuit television (CCTV) surveillance. Automated CCTV systems, however, have been neglected. I address these growing forms of surveillance through an institutional perspective to explore what has been called Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR). By tracing how plans for a war‐zone surveillance system are used as a resource in American policing practices, I find that they both involve a geo‐positioning of vehicles, analyzing the appearance of vehicles, and minimizing the labor of analyzing license plates. I show how these links are obscured, and then conclude with a discussion of three implications of this institutional perspective on ALPR.     

THE MICRO-ETHICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

In this article I offer an unfashionably ideological critique. I argue that, in the USA, ideology now appears in the form of the narratives that capitalism tells itself about itself, in particular at sites of commodity consumption. I examine three everyday sites in which capitalism constructs an Imaginary version of itself as it exhorts contemporary consumers to consume ethically: during a visit to a Target Superstore; on an overnight stay in a hotel room; and while purchasing a bag of fair trade coffee. In these moments and at these sites, corporations instruct us in the ‘ethical’ use of their commodities, and obeying those instructions promotes us to the rank of ‘consumer activist’. This article attempts to explain how this ‘ethical consumption’ – a form of what I call ‘micro-ethics’ – has displaced more social, or ‘macro’, forms of ethical action. To make my case, I argue that globalized capitalism denies many of us the social coordinates, or handholds, that are necessary if we are to feel that we can act meaningfully within the Symbolic Order, or social reality itself. This ‘deworlding’ effect, as Alain Badiou calls it, encourages us to reject social forms of ethical and political life and to retreat to a careful policing of the Imaginary boundaries of our ‘inner selves’ instead. In other words, global capitalism logically produces, as its own ideological support and supplement, a micro-ethics that attends only to what the single person can do, and only within the realm of consumption. We participate in this fantasy version of ‘eco-capitalism’ that advertising, publicity and other discourses establish to the extent that we accept consumption as the ultimate horizon of our ability to intervene in problems of ecological depredation and the exploitation of labour in the First and Third Worlds.     

Shifting repertoires: understanding cultural plurality in policing

The police is one of the most prominent organizations in the frontline of public administration. In order to deal with high external expectations, the organization has been said to develop and nurture multiple police cultures. Applying Grid Group Cultural Theory, or GGCT, we address the following questions: what sets of values, beliefs and practices has the police organization developed to deal with high expectations stemming from their publics? How do cultural tensions play out in real-life practices of policing “under pressure”? We find that cultural patterns described in the general literature on policing can be plotted on the GGCT map. Zooming in on the case of policing in the Netherlands, cultural plurality appears to be not only prominent in the police organization as such, but can also be found in the form of continuous cultural “tap-dancing” – swift, flexible and improvisational shifting – at various levels of active policing.     

A revised approach to racism in youth multiculture: the significance of schoolyard conversations about sex,dating and desire

Anxieties about social cohesion in multicultural societies have prompted scrutiny of how young people negotiate culturally diverse spaces. A key perspective of the literature at the intersections of youth studies and urban multiculture is that young people shift between racist and convivial modes of relationality to navigate their complex social worlds. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a culturally diverse high school in Melbourne, Australia, I suggest that this binary framing fails to capture some of the diverse logics and practices within multicultural youth sociality. Reconciling dichotomous conceptual frames that position young people as moving back-and-forth between forms of exclusion and openness, I propose an alternative frame – a perverse form of everyday cosmopolitanism – through which to consider young people’s intercultural relations. To do this, I draw on young people’s conversations about sex, dating and desire as an entry point for new theorising about racism. Race and ethnicity were cornerstones of students’ frequent discussions about sexual ‘tastes’ and activity, discourses that have racist histories and effects. However, students did not understand their social world in such terms. These students’ social practices offer a situated illustration of how racism can function as part of a more inclusive cosmopolitan ethos in young lives, which I term ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’.     

Social media and policing: A review of recent research

Studies of social media's impact on policing have emerged in several disciplines, including criminology, sociology, and communications. Despite their insight, there is no unified body of knowledge regarding this relationship. In an attempt to synthesize extant work, bring coherence to the field, and orient future scholarship, this article summarizes research on social media's implications for practices and perceptions of order maintenance. It does so by identifying how social media's technical affordances empower and constrain police services. By offering new opportunities for surveillance, risk communication, and impression management, emergent technologies augment the police's control of their public visibility and that of the social world. However, they also provide unprecedented capacities to monitor the police and expose, circulate, and mobilize around perceived injustice, whether brutality, racial profiling, or other forms of indiscretion. Considering these issues promises to enhance knowledge on contemporary directions in social control, organizational communication, inequality, and collective action. Suggestions for future research are also explored.     

Local practice and global data: loyalty cards, social practices, and consumer surveillance

Monitoring of consumers has become the most widespread mode of surveillance today. Being a multi-billion dollar business, the collected data are traded globally without much concern by the consumers themselves. Loyalty cards are an element with which such data are collected. Analyzing the role of loyalty cards in everyday practices such as shopping, I discuss how new modes of surveillance evolve and work and why they eventually make communication about data protection a difficult matter. Further, I will propose an alternative approach to the study of surveillance. This approach is concerned with local practices, focusing on subjective narratives in order to view surveillance as an integral part of culturally or socially manifested contexts and actions and not to view surveillance as something alien to society and human interaction. This will open up other possibilities to study modes of subjectivity or how individuals situate themselves within society.     

‘The past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold’: a posthumanist performative approach to qualitative longitudinal research

In this article I argue that in their current genealogical and philosophical configuration, qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) practices – and a wider regime of knowledge, ethical, moral, legal, technological, political and economic practices with which they are entangled – embed and enact representational assumptions in which the realities being investigated – time, change and continuity; the past, present and future – are taken as ontologically given and independent of these QLR (and wider) practices. My approach is to conceptualize QLR practices along nonrepresentational lines, through a philosophical framework that is able to materialize the constitutive effects of QLR (and wider) practices on the objects of study and knowledges produced. For this, I turn to Karen Barad’s posthumanist performative metaphysics – ‘agential realism’ – a framework that embodies and enacts a non-classical ontology in which entities are seen as constituted through material-discursive practices. On this account, QLR (and wider) practices are understood as an ineliminable and constitutive part of the realities they help bring into being.     

On deaf ears: anti-black police terror,multiracial protest and white loyalty to the state

In this essay, we explore the racialised dimensions of policing practices in Brazil. To do so, we look not at the police, their administrative organisation, and practices, but rather we examine the modes of sociality reflected in and produced by police violence. Drawing from a statistics-based analysis of the social and political outcomes produced by the state in its preparation of mega-sports events – evictions, incarceration, and police violence, for example – we identify a nexus between, on the one hand, racialised violence against black bodies and, on the other hand, white loyalty to the state, despite, or precisely because of, a specific type of violence perpetrated by the state on white bodies. Our primary contention is that we cannot understand white victimisation by the police – and the outrage it produces – without taking into consideration two foundational, dialectical aspects of the regime of rights: complicity and disavowal. White vulnerability to this specific form of state violence – a form of violence that is contingent and produces collective horror – reflects not only the disavowal of black suffering, but also the strengthening of the white public sphere.     

Cruising,space and surveillance: decolonizing sexuality in Singapore

ABSTRACT

The policing of homosexuality in Singapore through legislation and public policy are imbued with colonial legacies that have enshrined heteronormative values within its public sphere. However, communities within new online spaces in Singapore disrupt the heteronormative surveillance efforts deployed by the state within public, family and political landscapes. Through an analysis of a local online forum dedicated to cruising this article unpacks how local gay men resist, negotiate and deploy surveillance techniques to navigate these heteronormative structures and cruise safely in Singapore. This article demonstrates how online spaces have become part of an everyday resistance that characterize modern-day efforts to decolonize sexuality in Singapore.     

Policing “the Risky”: Technology and Surveillance in Everyday Patrol Work

While numerous surveillance and policing scholars argue that the rise of the surveillance society has normalized technological surveillance by police, the lack of empirical research makes it difficult to discern the true impact of risk management, security, and surveillance on police work. The present study uses in‐depth interviews and participant observation with two Canadian police agencies to explore the impact that police technologies have on police‐public interaction. From this analysis, we argue that the organizational shift toward risk‐oriented, intelligence‐led policing is not carried out on the ground. Instead, patrol officers often utilize technologies to legitimize the policing of the “usual suspects.”     

It's a long way to Auchterarder! 'Negotiated management' and mismanagement in the policing of G8 protests

Recent analyses of protest policing in Western democracies argue that there has been a marked shift away from oppressive or coercive approaches to an emphasis on consensus based negotiation. King and Waddington (2005) amongst others, however, suggest that the policing of international summits may be an exception to this rule. This paper examines protest policing in relation to the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. We argue that 'negotiated management' cannot be imported wholesale as a policing strategy. Rather it is mediated by local history, forms of police knowledge and modes of engagement. Drawing on interviews and participant observation we show that 'negotiated management' works best when both sides are committed to negotiation and that police stereotyping or protestor intransigence can lead to the escalation of any given event. In closing we note the new challenges posed by forms of 'global' protest and consider the implications for future policing of protest.     

The paradox of academic determinism and adolescent romance in Hong Kong

How do adolescents negotiate romance in an environment that is hostile to it? Why do they seek out and practice romantic engagements despite negative sanctions? This paper addresses these questions by examining how Hong Kong Chinese adolescents narrate and practice romance in the context of academic determinism – the discourse that academic success is the most important determinant of young people’s futures. I discuss how academic determinism shapes their narratives, ideals and practices of romance. I also analyse the paradox of academic determinism – how it simultaneously de-legitimises adolescent romance and fuels young people’s desire for it. By focusing on transactions between young people and their environments, this paper makes a unique contribution towards theorising how young people negotiate and practice romance in the context of academic pressure, adult surveillance and control.     

Surveillance as cultural practice

This special section of The Sociological Quarterly explores research on “surveillance as cultural practice,” which indicates an orientation to surveillance that views it as embedded within, brought about by, and generative of social practices in specific cultural contexts. Such an approach is more likely to include elements of popular culture, media, art, and narrative; it is also more likely to try to comprehend people's engagement with surveillance on their own terms, stressing the production of emic over etic forms of knowledge. This introduction sketches some key developments in this area and discusses their implications for the field of “surveillance studies” as a whole.     

CCTV oddity: archaeology and aesthetics of video surveillance

The paper narrates #OCTV – an art installation, performance and hacktivist project – the authors presented at the International Visual Sociology Association annual conference (Goldsmiths 2013). The installation used networked CCTV cameras and affordance of digital media to make surveillance space visible, beyond its representational value. It played with the co-constitution of the surveillance images through technologies, cultural practices, and ethics. The paper suggests the visual work of CCTV cameras is contextual to the specific configuration surveillance ecology takes. It proposes art projects as critical methodology for unpacking the social construction of the digital image. As a consequence, it recognises the challenges of using once-upon-a-time ethics forms with regards to ecologies of the visual. Instead, it suggests an ethical and political tension which should follow research ‘data’ during the lifetime of the project, and possibly in the ecologies yet to come.     

Emotional Subcultures

Scholars of emotional subcultures have produced a rich body of evidence in regard to how these communities operate and what makes them distinct from the mainstream. To assess the state of the field, I review in‐depth, qualitative investigations into how emotional subcultures indicate their collective identity by abiding by a shared set of norms regarding how members should feel – and display those feelings – in a given context. I organize my review along four dimensions of subcultural identity work (defining, coding, affirming, and policing) in order to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the subfield. In general, the current scholarship has successfully established the role that emotional subcultures play in the reproduction of inequality. However, it has not adequately explored an important domain of social life (namely, religion), it has not treated its core concepts with enough analytic precision, nor has it sufficiently addressed how subcultural feeling and display rules are generated in relation to local and broad structural constraints.     

The King is Dead,Long Live the King: Tall Tales of New Men and New Management in The Bill

This article argues that the new styles of management and new styles of masculinity promoted in the discourse of new public management (NPM) are not offering anything new at all. Through a semiotic analysis of the characters and behaviour depicted in the British television police drama, The Bill, we are able to make this explicit. The visual aspects and the time constraints of television communication produce a condensed representation of larger and more covert social phenomena. The episodes we have selected depict a moment of rapid organizational change within the workplace and offer a rich site to explore the implementation of a new policing order and the related repackaging of hegemonic masculinity. In this respect, gender and genre are an inextricable mix and display a remarkable resistance to change.