Christina Aushana | University of California, Santa Barbara (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Christina Aushana
Routledge eBooks, Jan 11, 2023
History of Photography, 2022
In this article, we animate the interstitial practices shared by photojournalists and police offi... more In this article, we animate the interstitial practices shared by photojournalists and police officers, and sketch some of the stakes for visual practitioners ‘bearing witness while black’. We employ visual analyses of protest images by Black photographers while tracing the specific visual techniques of oversight mobilised by law enforcement. These include police departments’ co-optation of news images to identify and criminalise racial justice protesters alongside efforts to professionalise police officers into photographers. We theorise the anti-Black intersections shared across these expansive formations – policing and photojournalism – in an effort to account for the ways in which both systems maintain and invest in damaging visualities that shape consequences ‘on the ground’ for Black and brown communities.
International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2022
This article describes youth involvement in the voter-mandated transition to a fully independent,... more This article describes youth involvement in the voter-mandated transition to a fully independent, powerful community commission overseeing the San Diego (California) Police Department. We begin by describing the historical context of police violence against communities of color in San Diego, and previous attempts to practice transparency and accountability in public safety. We then situate our work with local high school students to engage directly in the transition process, and to imagine future models of public safety with youth justice at its core.
The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences: Annual Review
This research attempts to adjudicate practices of contemporary artists in relation to the pervasi... more This research attempts to adjudicate practices of contemporary artists in relation to the pervasive border politics and discourses which have emerged both before the 1990s and post-NAFTA. By looking at the ways in which contemporary art practices have intersected with an activist aesthetic over the last 40 years, one may begin to see how the physical landscape of the U.S.-Mexico border region and the border wall itself are engendered with dichotomous representations of people living within close proximity to it. Within the scope of this project, various artworks are analyzed and critiqued for their ability to enable new spaces for public discourse and to function as modes of resistance to hegemonic narratives about the border. By analyzing instances of transborder art activism through the flows of "artscapes", this research looks closely at the work of artists like Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, and Ricardo Dominguez. Additionally, by utilizing the notions of artscapes and hybridity, this discussion will navigate the flows of transborder art activism by looking at how four specific art collectives have, since the Chicano art movement, critiqued global cultural flows in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border that have transformed the political and sociocultural arena of public discourse. Though prior research has been conducted on how players like the mass media have been responsible for shaping public opinion pertaining to the border, this research suggests that artists and other cultural activists play a crucial role in critiquing deeply embedded narratives about nationality, gender, and class as they relate to the U.S.-Mexico border and the encompassing border region.
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2021
This article examines how police vision is trained, tested, and scripted at the site of a local p... more This article examines how police vision is trained, tested, and scripted at the site of a local police academy in San Diego, California. I use the term scripting to illustrate how police recruits are directed to see, act, and respond to racialized, gendered others in scenario-based simulations during the final week of the police academy. Through participant-observation and methods in performance ethnography, I argue that turning to police training as an object of analysis offers ethnographic insights into the performance of tacit, ordinary methods of police violence. As a feminist intervention into the “scripting” of police vision, I describe my attempts to read against the grain of these scenario scripts by volunteering as a role-play actor in the police academy, taking on different embodied roles in order to examine how police recruits read the choreography of my racialized body. I suggest an investigation into the performativity of policing can move debates centered on racialized police violence beyond ideological frameworks that rely on the same visualizing technologies and logics of objectivity deployed by the institution of policing.
Surveillance & Society, 2019
While contemporary ethnographies on policing describe the use of televisual and cinematic images ... more While contemporary ethnographies on policing describe the use of televisual and cinematic images as ancillary police training materials (Manning 2003; Moskos 2008), few studies have examined how these visual texts shape the practice of patrol work. One of my primary aims as an ethnographer is to find different ways of understanding everyday policing by bringing the materials that construct officers' visual worlds under ethnographic analysis. These materials include cinematic images used in police academies to teach police recruits how to see like police officers. Attending to cinema's mobility in training facilities where trainees learn how to screen situations, bodies, and encounters in the field can offer new insights into understanding police vision. I proceed with the knowledge that Antoine Fuqua's 2001 film Training Day has been screened in San Diego's police academy. While Training Day reproduces the kinds of visual practices that are part and parcel of policing praxis, I argue that an ethnographic reading of the film offers critical insight into what happens when an idealized police vision "meets the ground" in practice. I explore the productive tension between cinematic models like Training Day and everyday patrol work through an analysis of the "precarious cinema" of policing, a concept I use to understand how police officers' engagements with Training Day reflect and reveal a mode of police vision that is often blind to the experiences of the policed, and the performance of ethnography as a visual profiling practice that offers new conceptual frames for approaching how these blinds spots manifest in the visual worlds of patrol officers. In a time when police violence and police brutality are invariably subject to the camera's scrutiny and a scrutinizing public, the political stakes for an increasingly visible police vision include contending with, accounting for, and being answerable to its own visibility.
Drafts by Christina Aushana
TO PRINT: This chapbook is meant to be downloaded and printed, and is already formatted to print ... more TO PRINT:
This chapbook is meant to be downloaded and printed, and is already formatted to print as a double-sided booklet. [Note: If you try to read it as a PDF, the pages will appear out of order.] **Please ensure that you have 2-sided printing selected, and you set the printer to flip along the short edge (not the long edge) of the page.** After it prints, just fold it in the middle, gather your reading group, and you're ready to try out Feminist Theory Theater!
>
>
>
>
>
ABOUT FTT:
Feminist Theory Theater (FTT) is a way to read theory (or anything) with others. Inspired by feminist STS and its commitments to embodied, situated and distributed sense-making, FTT asks readers to stage, discuss, and re-stage the text that they are reading. By centering provisional performances as materials for an ongoing process of collective interpretation, FTT asks readers to “put a text on its feet” not in the service of making a finished show, but rather as a mode of working, thinking, putting an argument into our bodies and classrooms and experiencing what it might feel like to stand with it.
>
>
>
>
>
HOW TO USE THIS WORK BOOK:
This printable chapbook was created to guide folks who are reading with FTT for the first time. It was made to be used by groups of student readers, but it can be used by any reading group interested in the possibilities of centering collective interpretation. Here, you will find a step-by-step guide through a reading of your choice. Each reading group can use one chapbook, or each member can use their own chapbook, as you like.
>>>>>
The chapbook is made to be marked up in the course of your reading and reflection. In this way, it serves not only to guide but also to document your group’s reading process. We invite you to send us pictures or PDFs of your entire marked-up chapbooks for a growing library archiving FTT readings, and would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on reading through FTT, and using this chapbook. Please send your marked-up chapbooks and/or feedback digitally, at FeministTheoryTheater@gmail.com.
Routledge eBooks, Jan 11, 2023
History of Photography, 2022
In this article, we animate the interstitial practices shared by photojournalists and police offi... more In this article, we animate the interstitial practices shared by photojournalists and police officers, and sketch some of the stakes for visual practitioners ‘bearing witness while black’. We employ visual analyses of protest images by Black photographers while tracing the specific visual techniques of oversight mobilised by law enforcement. These include police departments’ co-optation of news images to identify and criminalise racial justice protesters alongside efforts to professionalise police officers into photographers. We theorise the anti-Black intersections shared across these expansive formations – policing and photojournalism – in an effort to account for the ways in which both systems maintain and invest in damaging visualities that shape consequences ‘on the ground’ for Black and brown communities.
International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2022
This article describes youth involvement in the voter-mandated transition to a fully independent,... more This article describes youth involvement in the voter-mandated transition to a fully independent, powerful community commission overseeing the San Diego (California) Police Department. We begin by describing the historical context of police violence against communities of color in San Diego, and previous attempts to practice transparency and accountability in public safety. We then situate our work with local high school students to engage directly in the transition process, and to imagine future models of public safety with youth justice at its core.
The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences: Annual Review
This research attempts to adjudicate practices of contemporary artists in relation to the pervasi... more This research attempts to adjudicate practices of contemporary artists in relation to the pervasive border politics and discourses which have emerged both before the 1990s and post-NAFTA. By looking at the ways in which contemporary art practices have intersected with an activist aesthetic over the last 40 years, one may begin to see how the physical landscape of the U.S.-Mexico border region and the border wall itself are engendered with dichotomous representations of people living within close proximity to it. Within the scope of this project, various artworks are analyzed and critiqued for their ability to enable new spaces for public discourse and to function as modes of resistance to hegemonic narratives about the border. By analyzing instances of transborder art activism through the flows of "artscapes", this research looks closely at the work of artists like Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, and Ricardo Dominguez. Additionally, by utilizing the notions of artscapes and hybridity, this discussion will navigate the flows of transborder art activism by looking at how four specific art collectives have, since the Chicano art movement, critiqued global cultural flows in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border that have transformed the political and sociocultural arena of public discourse. Though prior research has been conducted on how players like the mass media have been responsible for shaping public opinion pertaining to the border, this research suggests that artists and other cultural activists play a crucial role in critiquing deeply embedded narratives about nationality, gender, and class as they relate to the U.S.-Mexico border and the encompassing border region.
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2021
This article examines how police vision is trained, tested, and scripted at the site of a local p... more This article examines how police vision is trained, tested, and scripted at the site of a local police academy in San Diego, California. I use the term scripting to illustrate how police recruits are directed to see, act, and respond to racialized, gendered others in scenario-based simulations during the final week of the police academy. Through participant-observation and methods in performance ethnography, I argue that turning to police training as an object of analysis offers ethnographic insights into the performance of tacit, ordinary methods of police violence. As a feminist intervention into the “scripting” of police vision, I describe my attempts to read against the grain of these scenario scripts by volunteering as a role-play actor in the police academy, taking on different embodied roles in order to examine how police recruits read the choreography of my racialized body. I suggest an investigation into the performativity of policing can move debates centered on racialized police violence beyond ideological frameworks that rely on the same visualizing technologies and logics of objectivity deployed by the institution of policing.
Surveillance & Society, 2019
While contemporary ethnographies on policing describe the use of televisual and cinematic images ... more While contemporary ethnographies on policing describe the use of televisual and cinematic images as ancillary police training materials (Manning 2003; Moskos 2008), few studies have examined how these visual texts shape the practice of patrol work. One of my primary aims as an ethnographer is to find different ways of understanding everyday policing by bringing the materials that construct officers' visual worlds under ethnographic analysis. These materials include cinematic images used in police academies to teach police recruits how to see like police officers. Attending to cinema's mobility in training facilities where trainees learn how to screen situations, bodies, and encounters in the field can offer new insights into understanding police vision. I proceed with the knowledge that Antoine Fuqua's 2001 film Training Day has been screened in San Diego's police academy. While Training Day reproduces the kinds of visual practices that are part and parcel of policing praxis, I argue that an ethnographic reading of the film offers critical insight into what happens when an idealized police vision "meets the ground" in practice. I explore the productive tension between cinematic models like Training Day and everyday patrol work through an analysis of the "precarious cinema" of policing, a concept I use to understand how police officers' engagements with Training Day reflect and reveal a mode of police vision that is often blind to the experiences of the policed, and the performance of ethnography as a visual profiling practice that offers new conceptual frames for approaching how these blinds spots manifest in the visual worlds of patrol officers. In a time when police violence and police brutality are invariably subject to the camera's scrutiny and a scrutinizing public, the political stakes for an increasingly visible police vision include contending with, accounting for, and being answerable to its own visibility.
TO PRINT: This chapbook is meant to be downloaded and printed, and is already formatted to print ... more TO PRINT:
This chapbook is meant to be downloaded and printed, and is already formatted to print as a double-sided booklet. [Note: If you try to read it as a PDF, the pages will appear out of order.] **Please ensure that you have 2-sided printing selected, and you set the printer to flip along the short edge (not the long edge) of the page.** After it prints, just fold it in the middle, gather your reading group, and you're ready to try out Feminist Theory Theater!
>
>
>
>
>
ABOUT FTT:
Feminist Theory Theater (FTT) is a way to read theory (or anything) with others. Inspired by feminist STS and its commitments to embodied, situated and distributed sense-making, FTT asks readers to stage, discuss, and re-stage the text that they are reading. By centering provisional performances as materials for an ongoing process of collective interpretation, FTT asks readers to “put a text on its feet” not in the service of making a finished show, but rather as a mode of working, thinking, putting an argument into our bodies and classrooms and experiencing what it might feel like to stand with it.
>
>
>
>
>
HOW TO USE THIS WORK BOOK:
This printable chapbook was created to guide folks who are reading with FTT for the first time. It was made to be used by groups of student readers, but it can be used by any reading group interested in the possibilities of centering collective interpretation. Here, you will find a step-by-step guide through a reading of your choice. Each reading group can use one chapbook, or each member can use their own chapbook, as you like.
>>>>>
The chapbook is made to be marked up in the course of your reading and reflection. In this way, it serves not only to guide but also to document your group’s reading process. We invite you to send us pictures or PDFs of your entire marked-up chapbooks for a growing library archiving FTT readings, and would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on reading through FTT, and using this chapbook. Please send your marked-up chapbooks and/or feedback digitally, at FeministTheoryTheater@gmail.com.