Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, has edited Writing the World of Policing: The Difference Ethnography Makes (University of Chicago Press, 2017), which brings together an international roster of scholars who have conducted fieldwork studies of law enforcement in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods on five continents. How, they ask, can ethnography illuminate the role of the police in society? Are there important aspects of policing that are not captured through interviews and statistics? And how can the study of law enforcement shed light on the practice of ethnography? What might studying policing teach us about the epistemological and ethical challenges of participant observation?
Read more at University of Chicago Press.
