Welcome to our inaugural group of USIH-IUPUI Community Scholars! In partnership with the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI, we are proud to host such a fantastic array of scholars studying diverse aspects of the field. Please join us in welcoming our USIH-IUPUI Community Scholars: Cari S. Babitzke, Matthew Guariglia, Zachary Jacobson, Drew Maciag, L. Benjamin Rolsky, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, and Rick Townsend. We’ll be introducing you to a new Community Scholar daily, so please stay tuned right here for their research finds and updates.
Matthew Guariglia is a historian of state power and race in the United States. He currently serves as a policy analyist researching surveillance, privacy, and technology policy at the civil liberties nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation and as an affiliated scholar at University of California, School of Law-San Francisco. He is the co-editor of the Essential Kerner Commission Report (Liveright, 2021) and his forthcoming book, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York will be published by Duke University Press in Fall 2023. You can also find his writing in NBC News, Slate, the Washington Post, and the Urban History Assocation’s blog The Metropole where he is the founding editor of “Displining the City” a series examning urban policing, incarceration, and crime. You can follow him on Titter: @mguariglia. Read on to learn more about Matthew’s scholarship and his plans as a USIH-IUPUI Community Scholar:
“While a Community Scholar, Matthew will be working on a monograph project tentatively titled: Burn the Files!: Information and Power in the United States. The book will explore the relationship between information, racial formation, and punitive state building from the nineteenth century and the role of paperwork in perpetuating slavery, to the role of files and documentation in building the state’s capacity for mass deportations and immigration restrictions, the role of government documents in enforcing Jim Crow segregation, all the way through data-hungry predictive policing algorithms and digital gang databases. Building on a growing literature on information and state power, this book will track how state actors understood controlling ‘paper subjects,’ the paper versions of people that exist in government repositories, as being an essential part of subordinating their embodied selves out in the world. The book will also pay special attention to oppositional movements and direct-action activism that sought to target, destroy, or mitigate the state’s hoarding of information—like legal challenges opposing the retention of mugshots or the burning of filing cabinets containing Vietnam War draft records—and explore moments in U.S. history when the government sought to destroy its own records to prevent transparency.”
0