Eyes Wide Shut: Police-Residents’ Relations in Danish Housing Projects
Talk by Associate Professor Anja Kublitz, Aalborg University.
This talk presents insights from a DFF‑funded research project on relationships between police and residents in Danish housing projects.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted with police officers and immigrant families respectively, it offers an ethnographic account of how each group navigates social relations structured by ignorance – what Taussig (1999) calls public secrets. While residents navigate by “knowing what not to know,” the police operate with an awareness of “knowing that they don’t know.” The talk suggests that it is within this matrix of differentiated modes of ignorance that relations between police officers and residents at the urban margins unfold.