Race-making, Police, and Globalized White Hegemony: A relational study of racialization in urban France and Brazil

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My proposed research is a comparative study of the ways in which police and the formation of whiteness intersect in urban France and Brazil. The approach I present in my research intersects critical standpoints of policing studies and critical race theory. My main hypothesis based on writers such as Martinot (2003), Gilmore (2007), Fassin (2013), and Alves (2018) is that police stands for a primary structure of contemporary race-making, and a vital agent to the construction of white hegemony. In my MSc dissertation, I conducted an ethnographic exploration of the French police. I suggested that in this racial color-blind context, the police engage in socio-spatial practices enacting a national dialectic defined by the pervasiveness and denial of racial relations. Based on the interrogations raised by the dissertation, the PhD research's aim is twofold: construct a detailed reading of the mechanisms by which processes of racialization operate, and build a racial lens through which to analyse the world of policing.To do so, I will conduct a relational study of police in France and Brazil. In both settings, I explore the routine structures, procedures, practices and technologies that police have available, and the racial logics they reveal. In particular, I question the processes by which the police engage in the racialization and spatialization of whiteness.