“Following the SWP Uniform”: A Play with ‘Bleeding’ Humans

Abstract

“Following the SWP Uniform” is a PhD thesis in the form of a Live-Action Role-Play (LARP). It manifests a multimedia digital Sensory Ethnography with the South Wales Police (SWP) in an engaging, playful invitation to ‘Explorers’ to join the research process: In pursuit of the Researcher’s research trajectory of patrolling along with SWP in the streets and following SWP uniforms on social media, Explorers co-experience ethnographic ‘places’ that emerge. Conceptualising place as experiential, contingent and interactive expresses the thesis’ more-than-representational methodological embeddedness and aligns with how LARPs function through (rule-based) improvisation. The thesis also materialises an aesthetic, experimental appeal to being ‘effective’ by being ‘affective’: What Explorers know through their experience of “Following the SWP Uniform” is equivalent but uniquely embodied and unpredictable. The same is true for what the Researcher learns from SWP, and what SWP know. Orientation is provided by focusing the LARP on ‘making Swansea a safe place’. Thus, this play empirically highlights notions of safe-place-making through online and offline police interactions, in the urban, devolved setting of Swansea whose policy-agenda changes the police’s ‘professional responsibilities’ and lived realities. By highlighting the emotional labour involved in policing as a ‘friendly Welsh community service’, this play elucidates contesting interpretations and feelings of ‘safety’, ‘belonging’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘community’. Most importantly, “Following the SWP Uniform” shares the SWP’s take on what it means to be (and act as a) Human, and why such is a valuable resource that needs protection.