The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues will present “How Things Fall Apart: Race and Suspicion in Police-Civilian Encounters” on Wednesday, Oct. 28, at 7 p.m. in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter (ATS) Auditorium. The lecture is part of the Clarke Forum's theme this semester, Inequality and Mass Incarceration in the United States, and the ongoing series Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty.
Nikki Jones, author of Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner City Violence, will illustrate how race, suspicion and bias shape the earliest moments of police-civilian encounters. She will draw on years of field research among black residents in urban neighborhoods, interviews with police and video recordings of such encounters to reveal key interactional adjustments that could be used to improve the quality of police encounters with the public.
Jones is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She also is a faculty affiliate with the Center for the Study of Law and Society. Her areas of expertise include urban ethnography, race and ethnic relations, and criminology and criminal justice, with a special emphasis on the intersection of race, gender and justice.
The program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum and co-sponsored by the departments of women’s & gender studies, educational studies, policy studies and sociology.
For more information, call 717-245-1875.
Published October 20, 2015