@Ferguson: Still here in the afterlives of Black death, defiance, and joy

Abstract

Collaboration and genre T his issue of American Ethnologist presents one of our occasional forums, in which anthropologists address contemporary events. It departs from the journal's usual issue lineup of research articles and book reviews by focusing on one collection-a multiauthored collage of essays, photographs, and artworks, titled "@Ferguson: Still Here in the Afterlives of Black Death, Defiance, and Joy." It began as an effort to textualize the effect of a March 2019 conference convened by the American Ethnological Society, the Association of Black Anthropologists, and the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists, in St. Louis, Missouri. The conference was held five years after the killing of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, an event that triggered a local uprising and helped bring the Black Lives Matter movement to global prominence. During the conference plenaries, St. Louis-based academics, activists, and practitioners came together to explore how structural forms of violence continue to shape Black lives and how they are working creatively to expose and transform these conditions. There are moments when a social crisis not only calls for relevant scholarship but also shows researchers the analytical work created by people living the crisis. Foregrounding the voices of outraged St. Louis residents, guest editors Shanti Parikh (Washington University in St. Louis) and Jong Bum Kwon (Webster University) organized this forum to present multiple intellectual and creative modes of engagement with racially divided St. Louis and its history. These modes include protest, artwork, community organizing, journalism, scholarly research, and emerging forms of sociality and politics. This forum is not meant as an anthropological account of multiple, positioned actors' points of view in a social field. Instead, it uses an anthropological sensibility to build outward from a placebased, contextually specific praxis in which academics, activists, and artists came together to think. Moreover, the forum takes an unusual form in that sections of the whole are not subsumed under a single explanatory, academic voice. That is why this forum is published here as a single, integrated piece, meant to be taken in as a whole. For an academic journal in anthropology like American Ethnologist, this is an experimental format. As we worked to implement our vision, we discovered that many hidden aspects of academic journal production constrained the type of content we can create.

The plurality of police oversight: a method for building upon lessons learned for understanding an evolving strategy

“…Introduction: the challenge of understanding civilian-led oversight of police Recent years have witnessed numerous political critiques of US policing centered around incidents of racialized violence (Bell, 2017;@Ferguson, 2020;Jackson, 2016;Simmons, 2015). The 2020 public protests that proliferated around the US and the world following the police killing of George Floyd can be seen as the apotheosis of such public criticism.…”