Police and the everyday production of cultural difference

How is the police equipped to work with migrants (or is it not)?
How to train the police in anti-discrimination?
How can social scientists help in understanding the ways in which cultural difference is produced, and sometimes dissolved, in the everyday work of the police?
How to translate between the different groups: migrants and police officers, social scientists and policemen?

In the roundtable discussion we will try to answer the above questions together with our guests:

Thomas Bierschenk
Professor of anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (Germany). He has studied public services in Africa, and is the co-editor of “States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies” (Brill, Leiden 2014).
He is now conducting a research project on the management of cultural difference by German police.

Kamila Dąbrowska
PhD holder in ethnography, specialist in the anthropology of memory and Polish-Jewish relations; Lecturer at the Institute of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Warsaw, and at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Co-editor of the volume “Anthropology against Discrimination” (2016). An employee of the Education Department at the POLIN Museum. She supervises anti-discriminatory projects addressed to the police.

Helena Patzer
Assistant Professor at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests include transnational migration, long-distance care, the critical anthropology of development, and urban studies. She has been involved in research projects on recent immigration to Poland.

Pracownia Warecka – zadanie finansowane w ramach umowy 973/P-DUN/2018 ze środków Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego przeznaczonych na działalność upowszechniającą naukę. Projekt jest realizowany przez Stowarzyszenie Pracownia Etnograficzna im. Witolda Dynowskiego we współpracy z Instytutem Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej UW.