Jessica Katzenstein is an assistant professor in the justice and social inquiry program at the School of Social Transformation. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on U.S. police reform and racism, and is situated at the intersections of American studies, critical race studies, and the anthropology of labor, violence, and the state.
Katzenstein's first project traces how U.S. police officers absorb and resist reforms during an ongoing legitimacy crisis, in order to understand why reforms perpetually fail to realize their promises to curb racialized violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with officers and reformers in Maryland, she examines how the everyday labor of policing produces a “police common sense” that translates reform efforts into the terms of police discourse. She thus theorizes police reform as a productive failure, demonstrating how its very ineffectiveness reproduces state power and white supremacy even as it is animated by ethical commitments and anti-racist ideals. Her new project explore the production of racial knowledge through an ethnography of police diversity programs in Arizona. Her work has been supported by the Center for Engaged Scholarship and by the National Science Foundation GRFP, DDRIG, and SPRF.