ONLINE: The State From Below: Democracy and Citizenship in Policed Communities

press release: Presented by UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, in collaboration with UW-Madison Department of Political Science. Register for the Zoom link.

Vesla Weaver will discuss a new technology and civic infrastructure, Portals, she and other researchers are using to initiate conversations about policing in communities where predatory systems of government are concentrated.

Based on over 850 recorded and transcribed conversations across 10 neighborhoods in five cities - the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of the police to date - Weaver and colleagues at the Portals Policing Project analyze patterns in political discourse.

The Portals Policing Project began in Milwaukee's Amani neighborhood and Newark, N.J.'s Lincoln Park and Military Park in 2016. Portals are virtual chambers where people in disparate communities can converse as if in the same room.

More than a data collection technique, the Portals are a medium for listening, a site of democratic deliberation, and a public good and civic infrastructure in their host communities. They increase the capacity of disparate people and communities to define their narratives and create connected political spaces, thereby expanding the possibility of studying politics in beneficially recursive ways.

Vesla Weaver is the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and a 2016-17 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She has contributed to scholarly debates around the persistence of racial inequality, colorism in the United States, the causes and consequences of the dramatic rise in prisons, and police power for race-class subjugated communities.

She is co-author with Amy Lerman of Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control, the first large-scale empirical study of what the tectonic shifts in incarceration and policing meant for political and civic life in communities where it was concentrated. Weaver is also the co-author of Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America (with J. Hochschild and T. Burch).