Event Date
Tuesday March 29, 2022
King Hall, Room 1301 or Via Zoom!
12:00 PM to 1:00 PM
Visualities of Violence and the Witnessing of Racial Discipline
This talk examines the wider terrain on which racial discipline and violence are witnessed. It considers the day-to-day practice of managing, controlling, and maintaining populations of people of color and the poor, by the state, within visual regimes that legitimize state violence. It considers the visual documentation of the juridical management of people of color through a historical lens to understand the present moment of police violence and enactments of war that are witnessed daily via social and established media. This historical engagement provides a way of understanding the act of witnessing, and the ways in which we presently live with police violence and imprisonment that result in the death or suspension of life for people of color and the poor. This talk questions how and why as a nation we have come to see and/or not see the extraordinary application of force as common, justified, and/or necessary and specifically asks, what is at stake materially? And how do they play a part in the accumulation of racial value?
Dr. Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas is an interdisciplinary scholar in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego in 2008. Her research is at the intersections of Critical Race Studies, Visual and Cultural studies and Geography and Law. Her work focuses on race, prisons and policing interrogates the critical questions; what lives constitute an ethical crisis? And what is the contemporary value embedded in the practice of racial violence?
She was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and has taught extensively in the UC system. She is currently completing her manuscript, Mortifications of the Flesh: Racial Violence in a Time of Crisis, which maps the historical continuities and discontinuities of policing and state violence on the material and discursive terrains of law, visual cultural productions and raced populations. She is also at work on a second book, Policing L.A.’s Human Terrain: The Criminal Non-Human at Point Zero, which examines Los Angeles County jail as a critical point on the city’s cartography of productive human terrain.