Citizens under Suspicion: Responsive Research with Community under Surveillance

Abstract

In the 14 years since the 9/11 events, this nation as a whole, and New York City in particular, has escalated its state‐sanctioned surveillance in the lives and activities of Muslims in the United States. This qualitative study examines the ramifications of police infiltration and monitoring of Muslim student and community‐based organizations. Drawing upon 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork among multiple research sites with Muslim secondary and college students in New York City, I examine how surveillance affected the relationships within communities utilizing notions of power, panoptic gaze, and governmentality. From the participatory action ethnographic study, which included this researcher's observations and field notes of meetings, forums, and workshops, and 25 semistructured interviews, key findings show that an insidious result of the New York Police Department's Demographics Unit has been an alarming rise in self‐discipline behaviors amid a culture of fear and panoptic gaze as well as diminished intercommunity trust and sense of solidarity among these youth themselves.

Participatory Design Research and Educational Justice: Studying Learning and Relations Within Social Change Making

“…As Jurow et al suggest (this issue), the forms of social change making and learning that are nurtured on the margins or in the borderlands may, at times, afford greater room for self-determined intellectual and relational activity. At the same time, the risks of visibility can include inviting in logics of surveillance (Ali, 2016;Erickson, 1996;Vossoughi & Escudé, 2016) or political repression, particularly amidst the rise of a white supremacist backlash (as witnessed in the banning of Mexican American studies in Arizona; see Phippen, 2015). But even within organizations and partnerships that are organized around shared equity goals, visibility can obligate forms of translation across hierarchies of power and epistemology that shift centers of gravity away from studying valued practices and forms of learning on their own terms.…”

Theorizing cumulative dehumanization: An embodied praxis of “becoming” and resisting state‐sanctioned violence

“…He explained, “They get the tanks and the helicopters and the drones and the body cams, now this is how they get you and hire more officers … Take their [police department's] money, put it back in that park … in that garden … help that mother that got kicked out of the apartment.” The carceral state has also perpetuated the dehumanization of black and brown bodies by maintaining a racialized free‐to‐unfree labor continuum (Buck, ) and utilizing corporeal capacity for neoliberal capital (Puar, ). Bodies are disciplined through panoptic mechanisms of policing that manifest materially and internally through the self‐perception of continuous surveillance (Ali, ; Foucault, ). When seeing police, one woman last arrested for using her sister's student subway pass explained, “My whole body freezes up.…”

“…The carceral state has also perpetuated the dehumanization of black and brown bodies by maintaining a racialized free-to-unfree labor continuum (Buck, 2002) and utilizing corporeal capacity for neoliberal capital (Puar, 2013). Bodies are disciplined through panoptic mechanisms of policing that manifest materially and internally through the self-perception of continuous surveillance (Ali, 2016;Foucault, 1977). When seeing police, one woman last arrested for using her sister's student subway pass explained, "My whole body freezes up.…”

Cumulative Dehumanization in Everyday Policing: The Psychological, Affective, and Material Consequences of Discretionary Arrests

“…These technologies aid in reinforcing hierarchical racial conceptions of humanity, making the carceral state a fundamental context from which to examine dehumanization today. The modern carceral state functions to discipline bodies through mechanisms of policing that manifest materially, through the increased presence of advanced surveillance instruments and police officers patrolling communities, as well as internally through the self‐perception of continuous surveillance (Ali, ; Foucault, ). The carceral state has increased the number of prisons and detention centers around the world, and the vast networks of surveillance stretching through and across communities of color.…”