Paul Mutsaers
Digital Ethnography, Ethnography, Profiling, Police, Anthropology, Social Media, Online Culture, Criminology, Globalization, Governance, Security
I am currently working on two research projects that are both captured by the title 'Policing and the Digital.' First, I am interested in big data systems and other cutting-edge technologies used by criminal justice organizations to predict crime and act proactively. As an anthropologist I want to understand profiling, and predictive policing more generally, as a cultural activity in which police officers draw on the social environment to make sense of the world and have it operate on the basis of selected norms concerning classifications of danger, deviancy and delinquency. Second, I am interested in how activist groups such as Black Lives Matter use digital media to protest against such police profiling and the assumptions about race and class that underpin it. More specifically, I shed light on how metadata such as hashtags give people the archival power that traditionally belonged to the criminal justice system.