CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
Carceral Citizens: Labor and Confinement in Puerto Rico
Carceral Citizens explores the coalescence of the carceral state and the voluntary sector in Latin America. Set in non-profit criminal rehabilitation programs in Puerto Rico, it follows the lives of drug offenders who have been diverted to self-help programs as an alternative to prison, and who have chosen to stay at these non-profits upon completing their mandatory court sentences in order to pursue sub-minimum wage jobs as “volunteers” in correctional facilities. It is animated by two overarching questions: As criminal justice, the voluntary sector, and self-help coalesce, what kind of “social participation” becomes possible? And what do terms like “volunteer” or “self-help” mean in correctional settings? By examining the reinvention of labor and volunteerism within correctional institutions, Carceral Citizens shows how mass criminalization, economic restructuring, and the entrance of the non-profit sector into the work of criminal rehabilitation since the late twentieth century are generating entirely new life directions for marginalized men across the Americas. Carceral Citizens will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024.
Comparative Police Racisms: Race, Knowledge, and the Politics of Recognition
Institutional racism and police brutality continue to claim Black lives. Meanwhile governments and commissions around the world deny institutional racism within the police as an organizing principle of state-sanctioned surveillance and violence. This ongoing study of Comparative Police Racisms, supported by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, sparks a crucial discussion on racism and policing beyond the familiar terrain of the United States mainland: in the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, and Oceana, from the US colony of Puerto Rico to Turkey, Pakistan, China, Palestine, and Australia. Challenging the mistaken notion that police racism is a uniquely 'American' problem, this project seeks to demonstrate how a methodological and theoretical commitment to ethnography can sharpen our understanding of the novel and timeworn ways in which policing, racism, and racial states articulate internationally.