Urban borderwork: Ethnographies of policing

Abstract

This special issue introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. To address how the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city shape current transformations in the ordering of urban space, the notions of borders and bordering are invoked. In contemporary cities across the global North and South, borders and bordering practices are reconfigured to address mobilities and flows deemed to threaten social order and have thus become manifestations of fear and anxiety linked to these mobilities and flows. At the core of our framework is the argument that urban policing is principally a practice of bordering. By approaching urban policing as a practice of bordering that is informed by material and imaginary manifestations, tensions between (de)territorializing and (de)stabilization are highlighted as both the vehicle and outcome of bordering practices. These tensions, we propose, can be captured through the concept of trembling. Trembling implies both a physical and emotional response to anxiety, excitement and frailty that is paradoxically built into borders and bordering practices.

“Erasing a mural does not erase reality”: Queer visibility, urban policing, and the double life of a mural in Ecuador

“…Monitoring movements and markings that might contravene delimited norms, these “more ‘subtle’ practices of policing” contribute to a process of “order-making” in the urban environment (Christensen and Albrecht, 2020: 391, 388). Like the legal architecture of the legislated city, such enforcements are “neither apolitical nor purely instrumental;” these mutable modes of restriction and regulation within the public sphere “often reflect specific ideological constructions of what urban space should look like and how it should be used” (Christensen and Albrecht, 2020: 392). This continuum of policing activities highlights how – in addition to enabling empowerment and rendering recognition – a position of “visibility may be related to control, regulation, increased vulnerability, as well as processes of normalization and depoliticization” (Edenborg, 2019: 10).…”

“…Despite officers’ divergent postures and public posturing across these three scenes, what remains consistent is their performance of surveillance. Monitoring movements and markings that might contravene delimited norms, these “more ‘subtle’ practices of policing” contribute to a process of “order-making” in the urban environment (Christensen and Albrecht, 2020: 391, 388). Like the legal architecture of the legislated city, such enforcements are “neither apolitical nor purely instrumental;” these mutable modes of restriction and regulation within the public sphere “often reflect specific ideological constructions of what urban space should look like and how it should be used” (Christensen and Albrecht, 2020: 392).…”

Police and policing in geography: From methods, to theory, to praxis

“…Published in the same special issue on "Urban Border Work: Ethnographies of Policing" (Christensen & Albrecht, 2020) as many of the above cited works, Pauschinger's (2020, p. 510) work in Brazil has put the geographical focus on border policing into conversation with cultural criminology, thereby evoking the concept of "edgework," or the emotional space that police officers inhabit "between rationalized and ordered routines on one hand, and risk, disorder and incipient violence on the other." For Vitale (2017), however, the ratio of "ordered routines" to "incipient violence" is skewed toward the former, with policing best described as consisting of "99 percent boredom and 1 percent sheer terror."…”

Modulating Eventfulness: How Liaison Policing Strategies Mitigate Potentiality in Indigenous Land Defence Organising

“…2017). Recent work theorising urban policing as bordering practices imbricated in (de)territorialising, (re)territorialising, and (de)stabilising socio‐spatial orders and state power provides a much‐needed corrective (Christensen and Albrecht 2020; Coleman 2016; Coleman and Stuesse 2015; Ramírez 2020). Work on bordering links complex repertoires of relational policing practices to broader institutional projects for securing white liberal orders conducive to racial capitalist accumulation.…”