How do people make sense of their continued reliance on unjust institutions? How do they evaluate potential for redress? Recent research highlights the state as a potential well of moral opportunities to promote dignity and inclusion (Lamont et al. 2016, 2017). Yet the everyday lives for residents of disadvantaged communities are often marked by conflictual interactions with state agents. In this talk, I explore these questions by drawing on a unique data set of 60 semi-structured interviews with recently arrested individuals in Cleveland, Ohio – a city currently under federal consent decree due to police use of excessive force.
Holly Campeau received her PhD (2016) in Sociology from the University of Toronto, and is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Alberta–specializing in the intersection between criminology, cultural sociology, and sociology of law–and Senior Researcher with the Global Justice Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, focusing on justice reform. Her award-winning research involves fieldwork and qualitative methods to examine the cultural structures and processes underlying law, policing, and criminal justice. Campeau has published multiple articles focusing on a range of topics, including police culture, organizational change, courts, and police-citizen encounters. Her work is published in American Journal of Cultural Sociology, British Journal of Criminology, Policing & Society, Social Problems, and The Sociological Quarterly. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight Grant to expand a study of police-citizen interactions from the perspective of both officers and arrested individuals.