Christina Aushana

Christina Aushana is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies working with Dr. Patrick Watson on the Open Research Area grant “Visions of Policing,” a study of how video technology impacts police oversight and training. She is formerly a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and completed her PhD in Communication at the University of California, San Diego.

She is an interdisciplinary performance ethnographer of policing and media studies scholar researching contemporary transformations in police training in situ and the tacit cultures of anti-Black violence that shape both police officers’ and recruits’ professional vision in interaction and visual cultures of policing. As a performance ethnographer and feminist film theorist of Assyrian-Iraqi and Colombian descent, she works from her positionality to understand how officers’ and recruits’ reenactments of cinematic clichés of Black and Chicano masculinity render sociolegal categories like “reasonable force” and “escalation” visible and interpretable in the “black box” theater of police role-play training scenarios. She is committed to experimenting with strategies of poetic justice made possible by performance ethnography, enrolling herself in academy training as an actor to not only witness how a racialized police vision is enforced in staged scenes of asymmetrical threat, but how such performances beyond the academy work to sustain asymmetrical conditions of anti-Blackness and how these racialized pedagogies impact policed diasporic communities of Black, Southwest Asian and North African refugees in East County, San Diego.

Selected Publications

• Aushana, C. (In preparation). ‘The Address of the Police Eye: What Feminist Film Theories Reveal about Policing’s Cinematic Epistemologies.” Targeted for placement in Feminist Media Studies.  
• Aushana, C., Berman, M., Gluzman, Y. and Klein, S. (Forthcoming). “Feminist Theory Theater: Acts of Reading as Embodied Pedagogy.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS), special issue edited by Emily York and Angela Okune.  
• Aushana, C. (2023). “Staging the Racial Optics of Police Vision: The Violent Rehearsal of Traffic Stops.” In S. Charman and J. Fleming (eds) Routledge International Handbook of Police Ethnography. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003083795.  
• Aushana, C., Collins, C. & Anderson, P. (2022). “‘When We Are In Crisis’: Youth-Centered Transitional Justice, Police Violence, and Political Imaginaries.” International Journal of Transitional Justice, 16(1): 19-35. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijab034.  
• Aushana, C. & Pixley, T. (2021). “Arresting Optics: Black Femme Witnessing in Protest Photojournalism and the Anti-Black Techniques of Police Vision.” History of Photography, 45(3-4): 399-410. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2022.2122239.  
• Aushana, C. (2020). “Inescapable Scripts: Role-Playing Feminist (Re)visions and Rehearsing State Violence in Police Training Scenarios.” Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory, 30(3): 284-306. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2020.1907685.  
• Aushana, C. (2019). “Seeing Police: Cinematic Training and the Scripting of Police Vision.” Surveillance & Society. 17 (3/4): 367-381. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.8676.

Presentations

•  “Racial (Re)Visions: Staging Anti-Black Optics and “Reasonable Force” in Police Training Scenarios,” Session: “Pedagogies of Oppression: Violent Imaginaries and Racialized Visions in Police Training Worlds,” 122nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Toronto, Canada. November 15, 2023.
• “‘When You See It, You Know’: Scripting Racialized Violence and Feminist (Re)visions in Police Academy Role-Play Training,” Session: Policing/Abolition Technologies. Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. November 11, 2023.
• “‘Out of Play’ Visualities: Role-Playing Violent Aesthetics and Anti-Blackness in Police Training Scenarios,” Session: Critical Ethnic Studies Committee Program Sponsored Panel “On the Idea of Community.” American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Montréal, Québec, Canada. November 3, 2023.
• “Police Ethnography: A discussion of the unique opportunities and challenges of ‘doing ethnography,’” Roundtable discussion for the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, Florence, Italy. September 7, 2023.
• “The Racial Optics of Police Vision: A Performance Ethnography of ‘Reasonable Force’ in Police Training,” Session: Police in the Americas II: Excessive Forces, Annual Meeting on Law and Society. San Juan, Puerto Rico. June 2, 2023.
• “Unboxing Racialized Rehearsals in the ‘Black Box’ Theater of Police Scenario Training.” Invited talk for the Interactional Foundations of Policing Symposium. April 7, 2023.
• “Arresting Optics: Black Femme Witnessing and Policing’s Racial Visions,” Visual Communication Section Top Paper panel, National Communication Association, New Orleans. Nov 19, 2022.
• “Staging Power, Screening Others: Performance Scripts for Policing and Ethnography,” Cultural Studies Association, Tulane University, New Orleans. June 1, 2019.
• “(Re)Defining Technologies: A Roundtable on Interventions & Resistance,” Critical Race and Digital Studies Conference, NYU University | Steinhardt, Washington, D.C. May 28, 2019.