Christina Aushana

CHRISTINA A. AUSHANA, then a graduate student at University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, was awarded funding in October 2018 to aid research on ‘Policing Virtual Worlds: Community-Scripted Scenarios for Police Training,’ supervised by Dr. Elana Zilberg. This research brings the materials that construct officers’ visual and performance training worlds under ethnographic analysis. As a performance ethnography of contemporary police training, this project intervenes in the experimental (re)visions enforced in a police academy located in Southern California by decentering the use of performance as metaphor in favor of fully inhabiting experimental performance research as a mode of inquiry into the tacitly racialized training scripts used to train new police recruits in California. It argues for a paradigm shift in ethnographic studies of policing and police violence by centering ‘scripting’ as a framework for examining how anti-Blackness and anti-immigrant sentiments ‘ weaponized against Latinx and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) refugees and migrants in East County, San Diego ‘ become inscribed in the bodies of recruits through methods of improvisation used to teach and evaluate recruits in simulations of real-world encounters. Drawing on performance ethnography, interviews with patrol officers and recruits, observations of police academy training, and collaborative work with SWANA community members, this project is a critical examination of allegedly ‘colorblind’ police training materials and how recruits become enrolled into narrow genres of police vision under the direction of training officers.