Sociology ETDs
Publication Date
Summer 8-1-2023
Abstract
Popular debates over policing often revolve around spectacular forms of police violence that grab national media attention. In this study, I examine the everydayness of contemporary U.S. policing and the antiblack and colonial roots that sustains its many forms. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork with a grassroots abolitionist organization and homeless service provider, and 23 interviews with Black adults across the U.S., I show how mundane policing serves as sites of racialization where the category of human is contested. I offer stops as an analytic to observe how these mundane forms of policing occur in places such as schools, airports, and neighborhoods. I argue that due to the pervasiveness of the U.S. carceral state in the daily lives of everyone that it touches, policing—within and beyond the criminal legal system—has become one of the major mechanisms of stratification that differentiates people into humans and nonhumans. These findings point to the need to abolish policing and punishment in all its varied forms.
Degree Name
Sociology
Level of Degree
Doctoral
Department Name
Sociology
First Committee Member (Chair)
Ranita Ray
Second Committee Member
Georgiann Davis
Third Committee Member
Susila Gurusami
Fourth Committee Member
Vilna Bashi
Project Sponsors
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, The Society for the Study of Social Problems Racial/Ethnic Minority Graduate Fellowship
Keywords
Stops, policing, antiblackness, human, race, colonialism, empire
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Recommended Citation
Tillman, Korey. "The (Im)mobility of Being: The Anti-Black and Colonial Roots of Contemporary Policing." (2023). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/soc_etds/107
