Ethnography has a long history in the humanities and social sciences and has provided the base line in the field of police studies for over 60 years. We have recently witnessed a resurgence in ethnographic practice among police scholars, and this Handbook is a response to that revival. Students and academics are returning to the ethnography arena and the study of police in situ to explain the evocative worlds of the police. The list of ethnographic sites is vast and all have fed the rejuvenation of ethnographic endeavour. Together they suggest innovation, theoretical depth, broad geographical boundaries, multi-site experiments, and multi-disciplinarity, all of which are central to the exploration of police and policing in the twenty-first century.
This Handbook encapsulates the revival of police ethnography by exploring its multidisciplinary field and cataloguing the ongoing ethnographic work. It offers an original and international contribution to the field of police studies and research methods, providing a comprehensive and overarching guide to police ethnography. We see the previous classics in every page and still note the influence of the early ethnographers. At the same time, we see the innovative breadth and diversity of these narratives. The aim of this Handbook is to highlight the mosaic that is police ethnography at a point in time and note with pleasure its contribution to the field once more. Ethnography may be messy, difficult, and at times uncooperative, but its results offer a unique insight into the perspectives of people and organisations that can hide in plain sight.
An accessible and compelling read, this Handbook will provide a sound and essential reference source for academics, researchers, students, and practitioners engaged in police and criminal justice studies.
Author(s): Jenny Fleming, Sarah Charman
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 681
City: London
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of contributors
Section One Mapping the field: histories, theories, and controversies
1 The revival of police ethnography: taking the road less travelled
2 Police ethnography: the classic era
3 What is ethnography? Methods, sensibility, and product
4 When is ethnography ‘real ethnography’?
5 Ethnography and the evidence-informed police practitioner
6 Untold stories of police ethnography
7 Philosophical anthropology and the premises of research about the police
Section Two Access and ethics
8 Staying cool in a hot spot: epistemology, ethics, and politics in police ethnography
9 White writing black and blue: who are our ethnographies for?
10 A collaborator? Ethnographic issues of police and peer suspicion
11 Outsiders inside: an accidental ethnography of policing in Brazil
12 Access to police organizations
13 Reflections on trust and acceptance in ethnographic studies of policing: the importance of police role conception
14 Policed ethnography: ethical and practical considerations arising from observations of public order policing in crowd situations
15 Deception, situated ethics, and police ethnography
16 Access no areas? Breaching the world of armed policing
17 Access denied: navigating access during ethnographic fieldwork on police reform in Kenya
18 Leaving the notepad behind: discussing the methodological implications of obtaining ethnographic access to the Mexico City municipal police
Section Three Ethnographic practice
19 Staging the racial optics of police vision: the violent rehearsal of traffic stops
20 Why do positive experiences matter? Appreciative inquiry in ethnography for understanding and transforming policing
21 Critical ethnography and the study of policing from ‘the other side’
22 Police ethnography, extraction, and abolition
23 Police ethnography in exceptional circumstances
24 Autoethnography: analysing the world of policing from within
25 Lurking with paedophile hunters: understanding virtual ethnography and its benefits for policing research
26 Appreciative ethnography: ‘coming from a position of strength’
27 Reflections on the parallel practices of police ethnographers and covert police
28 Exploring emotionality in ethnographic encounters: confessions from fieldwork on policing in Pakistan
Section Four Widening the ethnographic lens
29 The city as a medium of future policing
30 Security and policing shadows: pendular ethnography in urban Brazil
31 Going nodal: multi-sited policing ethnography
32 Policing and categories of difference
33 Narratives as plausibility structures: it’s stories, all the way down
34 Police ethnography and human agency
35 Governmentality studies and police ethnography: unpacking the complexities of contemporary policing practices
36 Tying ethnography down: linguistic approaches to investigating community policing
37 Blow up: ethnography as exposure
38 The public ethnography of policing: a never-ending story
39 Can police ethnography save the world?
Index
