Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

THEMATIC SEMINARS (ONLINE)

Enroll: To attend the first session (open to the public) and/or to express your interest in the working sessions, please follow this link: https://eveeno.com/crimscapes

Please note that the second and third sessions are working sessions entailing exchanges within small working groups and thus with a limit number of participants.
The event(s) will be hosted via zoom. All information will be communicated via email prior to the event(s). For any further questions, don't hesitate to get in touch with Jérémy Geereart via jeremy.geeraert@hu-berlin.de.

The CrimScapes research project (2020-2023) explores the growing mobilisation of criminal law, crime control measures and imaginaries of (il)legality as both responses to, and producers of, the politics of threat and uncertainty that are currently expanding across the European region. It works to analytically grasp the motivations behind, and challenges and implications of, criminalisation for the variety of actors and practices that (re-)shape entangled landscapes of criminalisation around abortion, drug use, hate speech, infectious diseases, sea rescue, sex work and women's prisons.

CrimScapes is a joint project realised by 11 researchers of four universities, namely Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Université Paris Saclay and University of Helsinki. The project is funded by NORFACE.

THURSDAY, MAY 27TH, 3-6PM (CEST): KICK-OFF SESSION
3 PM | KEYNOTE BY AYA GRUBER: “POLICING AND BLUELINING”

Abstract: In this keynote, Gruber explores the increasingly popular claim that racialised brutality is not a malfunction of policing, but its function. Or, as Paul Butler counsels, "Don’t get it twisted—the criminal justice system ain’t broke. It’s working just the way it’s supposed to." This claim contradicts the conventional narrative, which remains largely accepted, that the police exist to vindicate the community’s interest in solving, reducing, and preventing crime. A perusal of the history of organised policing in the United States, however, reveals that it was never mainly about interdicting crime. While policing’s crime-reduction success is questionable, one obvious tremendous success has been its control of race, space, and place. Police draw blue lines around Black neighborhoods—just as banks drew their red lines—designating them as high-risk, pathological spaces. Police use aggressive stop and frisks, intense surveillance, and military-style home raids to keep the people in their spatial and social place. Brutality is the business of policing, reinforced in recruitment, training, and practice. Gruber concludes that because racialised brutality is integral to policing, reformers should not primarily focus on incarcerating specific bad cops who draw headlines. The "bad apple" narrative casts racist violence as individual and deviant rather than institutional and structural and undermines the current promising, if glacial, movement toward dismantling policing as we know it.

Bio: Aya Gruber is a law professor at the University of Colorado and an expert on criminal law, legal feminism, violence against women, and critical theory. She has previously taught at the University of Iowa Law School and Harvard Law School. Gruber graduated from of U.C. Berkeley and Harvard Law School, after which she served as a public defender in Washington, DC and Miami, Florida. Her frequently cited scholarly articles combine insights from practice with extensive research to articulate a feminist and critical race critique of carceral approaches to gender violence. In 2020, Gruber published her debut monograph, The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration.

4 PM | PRESENTATION OF THE CRIMSCAPES PROJECT BY PROF. DR. BEATE BINDER AND DR. AGATA DZIUBAN

Abstract: This presentation introduces the aims and theoretical perspectives of the newly started European research project, CrimScapes. Bringing together researchers from Cultural Anthropology, Sociology and Gender Studies, the project explores the expanding application of criminal law, crime control measures and imaginaries of (il)legality as both responses to, and producers of, the politics of threat and uncertainty that are currently expanding across the European region. Given the inherent tensions between democratic processes and everexpanding legal regulations, the project investigates this growing reliance on criminal technologies and institutions as a challenge to the participatory nature of democratic societies, and as possible symptoms and causes of the general sense of turbulence that has come to dominate much of economic, social and political life. It works to analytically grasp the motivations behind, and challenges and implications of, criminalisation for the variety of actors and practices that (re-)shape entangled crimscapes - i.e. landscapes of criminalisation. Bio: Beate Binder is professor for European Ethnology and Gender Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2008. She studied Empirical Cultural Studies (Empirische Kulturwissenschaft) and History with emphasis on Eastern European History at the University of Tübingen, where she received her MA in 1988 and her PhD in 1997 with a study on the everyday history of electrification ("Elektrifizierung als Vision: Symbolgeschichte einer Technik", Tübingen 1999). In 2006 she habilitated in European Ethnology with the study "Streitfall Stadtmitte: Der Berliner Schlossplatz" (Köln 2009). A list of publications can be found here.

Bio: Agata Dziuban is assistant professor at the Institute of Sociology of the Jagiellonian University. Her research projects focus on sex workers’ self-organisation in Europe, working conditions of migrant sex workers in Poland and the making of European HIV-related policies. Within the CrimScapes project, she looks at the ways in which entanglements of sex work, migration and labour policies shape sex workers' lived realities in Poland. A list of publications can be found here.

4:45 PM | DISCUSSION

Full Programm