When Victims Aren't Blameless: Police Killings and Reasonable Doubt

press release:

Dr. Cacho's talk will examine the police shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, who was a Mexican national that Pasco, Washington police officers killed in 2015, sparking international criticism toward US state violence.

Professor Lisa Marie Cacho is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, English, Latina/Latino Studies, and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (NYU Press, 2012). Her work demonstrates how race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and legality work interdependently to assign human value and to render relations of inequality normative, natural, and obvious in both dominant and oppositional discourses. She analyzes a range of sources, such as ballot measures ascribing "illegality" to persons, legal provisions targeting "criminal aliens," court documents evaluating degrees of "guilt," and related media accounts to understand how value is assigned to devastating effect.

This lecture is brought to you by Comparative US Studies, the UW Human Rights Program, the Havens Center for Social Justice, Freedom Inc. and funding from the UW Anonymous Fund.