Safe Sight: Migrant Policing and Anthropologies of Vision

Vortrag von Alice Elliot (Goldsmiths London)

This talk traces how police encounters radically shape the experience and possibility of migrant safety in urban space. The talk draws on the ongoing work of Progetto Yaya, a social action and research collaboration on racial profiling and racist policing in Italy, born from the migrant-led collection of testimonies of police encounters. Focusing specifically on racializing visions and the premises and consequences of seeing and being seen by the state, I trace how classic approaches to racial profiling (institutional racism, practices of whiteness, implicit bias) can be sharpened through ethnographic attention to sensory dimensions of vision, including relational ties, embodied skills, and cosmological framings. Reflecting on the possibilities and challenges of collaborative research in a context of heightened migrant policing and violent horizons of ‘security,’ the talk begins to draw out a mode of research engagement that recasts the architecture, content, and subjects of ‘participation’ and ‘observation,’ both in the practice of racial profiling and in its anthropological study.