Jessica Katzenstein is an assistant professor in the justice and social inquiry program at ASU's School of Social Transformation. She is a cultural anthropologist working at the intersections of American studies, critical race studies, and political anthropology.
Katzenstein's current project ethnographically traces the logics of U.S. policing by examining how police officers in Maryland absorb and resist reforms in patrol work, training, militarization, and community policing. She charts how the everyday labor of policing socializes officers into “police common sense,” an epistemological framework that translates reform efforts into the terms of police discourse and legitimizes racialized violence. She ultimately argues that police common sense forecloses the aspirations of liberal reforms and provides a potent frame for today's burgeoning police powers. Her new project explore the production of racial knowledge through an ethnography of police diversity programs in Arizona.
Katzenstein's work has been published in Cultural Anthropology and American Quarterly, as well as by the Costs of War project. Her research has been supported by the Center for Engaged Scholarship and by the National Science Foundation GRFP, DDRIG, and SPRF.