RSVP HERE
Policing the City: An Ethno-graphic follows the crucial insights anthropologist and sociologist Didier Fassin relays from the months he spent shadowing officers of an anticrime squad overseeing low-income neighborhoods outside of Paris. Originally published as the landmark study Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing, Policing the City expertly distills hundreds of pages of insightful reporting into a vibrant and eminently readable graphic novel. In the wake of an unprecedented global reckoning with structural racism, this deeply researched graphic novel is necessary reading for the present day. Policing the City illuminates a clear direction to reform a system with problems that relate nearly identically to our own.
Didier Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist. He is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and his previous books include Prison Worlds, The Will to Punish, and Death of a Traveller.
Jake Raynal studied applied arts at Paris’s printing academy, the École Estienne, and has been making comics since 1994.
Alisse Waterston is Presidential Scholar and Professor, City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author or editor of seven books including most recently the graphic novel, Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning.
Fonda Shen is the Executive Coordinator at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and the Program Director at the Initiative for a Just Society, where she works on active criminal defense and impact litigation cases, engages in research and writing on prison and police abolition and critical theory, and coordinates public seminars on critical theory and social justice.
This event is co-organized by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and Justice-in-Education Initiative. It is cosponsored by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, and Columbia Maison Française.
Attendance at SOF/Heyman events will follow Columbia-issued guidelines as they continue to develop. Given the current recommendations, there is limited seating for the JIE community and other COLUMBIA AFFILIATES only. For everyone else, we're planning to livestream this event, allowing for virtual attendance. This event also will be recorded. By being electronically present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.