Organizers

Julian Go - University of Chicago

Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where he is also a member of the Committee on International Relations, a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, and Senior Fellow of the University of Chicago Society of Fellows. He has published widely on US empire, US colonialism, global historical sociology, and postcolonial social theory. He is the author of The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (co-edited with Anne Foster), American Empire and the Politics of Meaning, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to Present, Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, and most recently, Policing Empires: Militarization and Race in Britain and America, 1829-present (Oxford, forthcoming).

Stuart Schrader - Johns Hopkins University

Stuart Schrader is Associate Research Professor of Africana Studies and Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at Johns Hopkins University and one of the co-conveners of this symposium. He is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing and the editor of a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies, Global Counterinsurgency and the Police-Military Continuum.

Graduate Assistant

Heena Mohammed - University of Chicago

Heena Mohammed is a second year Masters in Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Heena most recently served as the Deputy Head of Police Powers for the UK Home Office – overseeing a portfolio that including stop and search, arrests, custody, deaths in policy custody and racial disparities in the use of police powers. Currently, Heena organizes and delivers educational programming for incarcerated populations. Heena is a 2022-23 Obama Scholar and is a Fulbright Scholar with the US-UK Fulbright Commission.

Presenters

Enrique Alvear - University of Illinois at Chicago

Enrique Alvear is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago with an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Studies. His research interests are urban policing, globalization, urban marginality, and social inequality in Chile and the US. Enrique is currently a 2022 ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (ASA DDRIG) research scholar as well as an International Dissertation Research (IDRF) fellow supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.


Sabrina Axster - Johns Hopkins University

Sabrina Axster is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her doctoral thesis explores the racialized construction of migrant exploitability through border controls and has been supported by the APSA-NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant and the German Academic Exchange Service. Her follow-up project examines the conditions under which migrants are constructed as a threat to society, starting with the targeting of Jewish migrants in the inter-war years in Germany and tracing these dynamics up to the debates around Syrian refugees after 2015.


Danielle Beaujon - University of Illinois at Chicago

Danielle Beaujon is a Bridge-to-Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate in the department of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her PhD with distinction from New York University's joint program in History and French Studies. Her current book project, “Criminalizing the Casbahs: Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers, 1920-1950,” interrogates the quotidian interactions between the police and North Africans in these two Mediterranean port cities. The book explores how the racialized policing of North Africans in Marseille and Algiers built not just on visual codes of race, but on the way that police practice mapped ideas of race onto the space of the city.


Colleen Bell - University of Saskatchewan

Colleen Bell is a faculty member in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research contributes to theorizations of war, police, and security and explores the contested boundary between Western-led military and civilian operations in the Global South. She is author of The Freedom of Security: Governing Canada in the Age of Counterterrorism and co-editor of War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention.


Andy Clarno - University of Illinois at Chicago

Andy Clarno is associate professor of Sociology and Black Studies and coordinator of the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His first book Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994 (Univ. of Chicago Press 2017) examined the shifting relationship between racial capitalism and settler colonialism in the Johannesburg and Jerusalem regions, with a focus on racialized poverty and militarized policing. The PCRG is a collective of activist scholars that provides research support to abolitionist movements and transformative justice organizations resisting police surveillance and repression in Black, Latinx, and Arab/Muslim communities. Based on this work, the PCRG has just completed a book manuscript titled Carceral Chicago: Weaponized Data and the Webs of Imperial Policing.


Adam Elliott-Cooper - Queen Mary University of London

Adam Elliott-Cooper is a Lecturer in Public and Social Policy the Department of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. Adam Elliott-Cooper received his PhD from the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, in 2016. He has previously worked as a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at UCL, as a teaching fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and as a research associate in the Department of Geography at King's College London. His first monograph, Black Resistance to British Policing, was published by Manchester University Press in May 2021. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021).


Yanilda González - Harvard University

Yanilda María González is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on policing, state violence, and citizenship in democracy, examining how race, class, and other forms of inequality shape these processes. González’s book Authoritarian Police in Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2020), studies the persistence of police forces as authoritarian enclaves in otherwise democratic states, demonstrating how ordinary democratic politics in unequal societies can both reproduce authoritarian policing and bring about rare moments of expansive reforms.


Karl Hapal - University of the Philippines

Karl Hapal is an Assistant Professor at the College of Social Work and Community Development, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Pilippines. Prior entering the academia, he worked as a researcher for a human rights organisation in the Philippines. His fields of interest are human rights, violence, community development, and community organising.


Markus-Michael Müller - Roskilde University

Markus-Michael Müller is a Professor with Special Responsibilities in International Development Studies at Roskilde University. His research focuses on transnational security governance, policing, international interventions, knowledge production, and counterinsurgency, with a regional focus on Latin America.


Lou Pingeot - University of Ottawa

Lou Pingeot is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa. Her research is situated at the intersection of global historical sociology, postcolonialism and international practice theory. She is interested in the link between external and internal security and how practices and discourses of intervention circulate transnationally, with a focus on the role of police forces. She has done research on policing in UN peace operations and in Canada. She is a graduate of McGill University (PhD, 2020) and Sciences Po Paris (MA, 2010).


Steph Saxton

Steph Saxton is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University specializing in American political development, racial politics, and the criminal legal system. She is working on a dissertation titled "Goal, Coal, and Oysters: When America Made Police" about the development of police departments across the United States in the nineteenth century. She is also a fellow for the Right to the City project that hosts public lectures, and brings Baltimore organizers together with international organizers for skill-shares and relationship-building.


Kathryn Takabvirwa - University of Chicago

Kathryn Takabvirwa is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is a social and cultural anthropologist, studying the policing of mobility in Southern Africa, with particular focus on Zimbabwe and South Africa. She currently working on a book manuscript on police roadblocks in Zimbabwe, tentatively titled Citizens in Uniform. She has previously conducted research on xenophobia, local governance, and migration with scholars at the African Center for Migration and Society, in Johannesburg. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University, her MA in Forced Migration Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, and her BA in Anthropology and African Studies from Yale University.


Maya Van Nuys - University of Chicago

Maya Van Nuys (she/her) is a PhD candidate in international relations and comparative politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Maya’s research interests focus broadly on political violence, policing, and postconflict peacebuilding. Maya’s work centers critical approaches to international relations that stress the role of racism and legacies of empire in conflict dynamics and state-building.


Zoha Waseem - University of Warwick

Zoha Waseem is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. She was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at University College London and a teaching fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She researches police militarization in postcolonial settings, informality in policework, police reforms in hybrid regimes, urban insecurity, and migration. Her research has been published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Policing and Society, and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. She is the author of "Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi" (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2022).


Jesse S.G. Wozniak -West Virginia University

Jesse S.G. Wozniak is an associate professor of Sociology in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University. His works centers on policing, social control, state formation, and neo-imperialism. He serves on the leadership team of the Alliance for Police Accountability and is the author of Policing Iraq: Legitimacy, Democracy, and Empire in a Developing State (University of California Press, 2021).