Cross-cultural encounters in everyday urban policing

ABSTRACT

This paper is focusing on the way in which securitization is performed, experienced and felt in everyday embodied encounters. It explores encounters between citizens and urban authorities – here represented by police officers holding different positions in relation to the public. The context of the research is public spaces marked as a potential threat to the security of the city. That can be streets, squares or neighborhoods represented as ‘ghettoes’ in the public debate. The research object is encounters with the authorities (in which majority and minority agents can take different positions) and the experiences, emotions and power relations lived out in these encounters. The methods are interviews with both police officers and citizens focusing on their experiences of cross-cultural encounters. To achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning horizons circumscribing the encounters, we interpret them through the lens of theories of embodied encounters, emotions and different modes of violence and power relations.

Keywords:

• Encounter
• police
• practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark [DFF 1327- 00077].

Notes on contributors

Lasse Koefoed

Lasse Koefoed is Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Geography at Roskilde University, Denmark, and a highly visible scholar within critical geography. His research interests relate to urban geographies, cities and ethnic minorities, nation and nationalism, postcolonialism, cross-cultural encounters, and everyday life. Lasse has been involved in several major research projects financed by the Danish Research Council for Social Science, including the latest project ‘Paradoxical Spaces: Encountering the other in public space’. He has published widely in international journals like Mobilities, Ethnicities,Cities and Antipode.

Kirsten Simonsen

Kirsten Simonsen has been Professor in Social and Cultural Geography at Roskilde University since 1996. She is an internationally renowned urban scholar and a leading critical voice in international human geography, a role for which she was recently (2010) awarded an honorary degree by the University of Stockholm. She has published extensively (both journal articles and edited books) in the fields of urban studies, philosophy of geography, space and place, practice theory, minorities, and everyday life. Her latest research projects, all financed by the Danish Research Council for Social Science, are ‘The Stranger, the City and the Nation’ and ‘Paradoxical Spaces: Encountering the other in public space’ (with Lasse Koefoed and Maja de Neergaard).