Please join us on Thursday 7 March for our first Deakin Anthropology Seminar of the year with A/Prof Nicholas Shapiro: Science and technology’s role in the carceral ecologies of Los Angeles. 

At Carceral Ecologies, a multidisciplinary lab based in the Institute for Society and Genetics, we have been working to understand the role of science and technology in advancing racialized mass incarcerations in Los Angeles—home to the world’s largest jail system. We have been focusing both on one of the headwaters of policing—surveillance—and one of its gruesome termini—in-custody deaths. We seek to push beyond identifying undone science and move towards conducting analyses with impacted community members to understand long standing racialized violence. We bring with us a commitment to “wary alliances” to advance the questions articulated by our community partners that exceed standard anthropology of science practice. In this presentation we will detail our work on helicopter police surveillance, driven by military contractors and co-signed by NASA, and the way that medical examiners provide biomedical alibis to Sheriff narratives for in-custody deaths.  

Nicholas Shapiro is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Society & Genetics, UCLA. He is a multidisciplinary environmental researcher that studies, and designs interventions into, issues of chemical contamination and climate change. He has worked tracking the quasi-legal resale of 120,000+ chemically contaminated housing units after Hurricane Katrina, developing air monitoring systems with communities impacted by unconventional natural gas extraction, and testing fossil fuel-free means of long distance air travel. 

Our speaker will be presenting via Zoom: 

https://deakin.zoom.us/j/86490907783?pwd=NmNVTHJTTlNvcjNmbitGSVZqbXIvQT09&from=addon 

Meeting ID: 864 9090 7783 

Password: 02325400 

Staff, HDRs and students are all welcome. 

Any inquiries please contact David Giles d.giles@deakin.edu.au or Timothy Neale t.neale@deakin.edu.au