The Institutional Capture of Abolitionist Dissent: Ending Genres of Police Science

Research can reproduce racial violence; here's how not to do that

Conflict and harm are inevitable within democratic social movements. In a pair of columns for Interactions by the Association for Computing Machinery, Rachel Kuo and her Mon Mohapatra explore the role endings and dissolutions play in research and social organizing. In "The Institutional Capture of Abolitionist Dissent: Ending Genres of Police Science," Mohapatra and Kuo argue for abolitionist movements as a framework to end research that reproduces systems of violence. As they write,

"A body of scholarship has emerged on the new machinery of policing, such as predictive analytics, data surveillance, and body cameras. This research uses methodologies drawing on police data, sources, and perspectives as primary source material. These methods do not sufficiently reject the role of policing, instead assimilating the source of violence by configuring police as the solution for police brutality."

Kuo and Mohapatra are joined by Rigoberto Lara Guzmán for a second piece in the same issue titled "Lateral Violences: Speculating Exit Strategies within Movements (A Concept Note)." In this piece, Dr. Kuo, Mon Mohapatra, and Rigoberto Lara Guzmán explore how planning for endings, exits, pauses, and dissolutions strengthens the long-term viability of social movements:

"We can anticipate lateral violence by remembering that networks, like all energy configurations, have a life cycle: emergence, when principles and values are established, then growth and maintenance, which emphasize capacity building, and finally, the ending of a network, which may create new offshoots."

Community-based research can be tricky; this piece offers practical recommendations for a complicated process

In social movement research, community-based and participatory collaborations are necessary for coproducing knowledge that can contribute to social change, as well as for facilitating processes of redistributing resources and expertise. Ideally, these partnerships are mutually generative. In practice, these partnerships can be tricky to navigate and can reproduce harmful dynamics given the complex, contentious, and often extractive relationships that universities and nonprofit research institutions have with activists, grassroots organizations, and political collectives.

This essay outlines some challenges and recommendations for researchers within academic institutions and research centers conducting community-based research in digital environments. Community-based research is a participatory process that brings together members of a self-defined community and/or representative organization to coproduce a research design and process, mutually share expertise, and cocreate useful outcomes and tools. In addition to community organizing using different digital tools (e.g., social media and crowdfunding platforms), research collaboration also relies on digital applications, including video conferencing, group communication and messaging platforms, email, and cloud storage systems.

The recommendations presented here reflect the ways that individual researchers may often move between and work across different political collectives and groups and participate politically beyond their institutional affiliation. These lessons emerge primarily from working in collaboration with small independent political groups, organizations, and collectives, such as mutual aid networks and worker collectives and cooperatives.

Social media platforms legitimate speech and shape journalism

Studies suggest a growing interdependence between journalists and Twitter. What is behind this interdependence, and how does it manifest in news texts? We argue that social media platforms (and Twitter in particular) have situated themselves as purveyors of legitimated content, a projection that journalists have not fully challenged and at times abetted. Instead, journalists rely on these platforms both for access to powerful users and as conduits to surface the words of ‘ordinary people.’ This practice treats tweets more like content, an interchangeable building block of news, than like sources, whose ideas and messages must be verified. Using a corpus of U.S. news stories with tweets in them, we provide empirical evidence for our argument of the power of platforms to legitimate speech and shape journalism. This study illuminates journalists’ role in transferring some of the press’s authority to Twitter, thereby shaping the participants in and content of public deliberation.