“The cameras look at us when we be doin’ our dances”: Children’s everyday experience of securitization

Abstract

Poor BIPOC neighborhoods and schools in the U.S. are historically and increasingly securitized. CCTV, weaponized police, body- and dashboard cameras, and mobile surveillance stations follow racially and socioeconomically marginalized children to school, through public space, into virtual space, and inside homes. To investigate the parameters and effects of such widespread securitization, I conducted several years of ethnographic fieldwork and participatory visual methods with children of different races and genders living near the poverty line in Cincinnati, OH. I found that even children who had not (yet) been targeted by police navigated an everyday minefield of surveillance and policing, analog and digital, by city, private companies, and schools. Children’s perspectives form the unifying logic of this paper, organized into four themes: ubiquitous securitization, fear of punishment, invasion of privacy, and lack of protection. Their embodied experiences highlight securitization’s many forms of everyday harm often downplayed or absent in media and scholarship. Children’s stories and drawings also reveal the interplay among components of securitization without collapsing policing and surveillance, police and public school, or digital and analog. Rather, various securitizing actors, spaces and technologies are linked by lines of digital data with the potential to track children’s movement, connect past and present offenses, and render physical violence. In turn, the fear of securitization’s impacts or failures becomes itself a form of mundane violence. Yet the connections that form a cohesive experience greater than the sum of its parts can also link scholars and organizers working on disparate components towards shared goals of alleviating securitization’s everyday, uneven, and often unseen harms.