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Emily C. Kaufman

Research Interests:
Children's Political Geography
Feminist Methodology
urban geography
Digital geographies
Racism in Law Enforcement
Police Abolition
community geography
Education

PhD, Geography, University of Kentucky

Certificate in Social Theory, University of Kentucky

MA, Socio-Legal Studies, The International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Onati, Spain

MA, Geography, Syracuse University

BA, Geography and Women's and Gender Studies, Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon

Research

I have explored discourses of fear that demarcate 'dangerous bodies', and resulting lived experiences. My first article in Gender, Place, and Culture examined how welfare reform deployed fear and disgust to control the fertility of poor BIPOC women. My MA research at Syracuse analyzed the convergence of experimental policies of social control within a neighborhood, focusing on the everyday experience of those whose bodies, behaviors, and mobility is criminalized. I also focused on how a conditional cash transfer addressed issues of national and global security at the scale of the household and the body. My Socio-Legal MA thesis examined social control through emplacement and ex-placement in an urban park. To banish the fear once associated with Bryant Park, design and marketing strategies branded elements like trash as in-place, while marking certain bodies and behaviors as 'unclean' and 'unsafe' and thereby out of place. 

My dissertation research focused on police strategies of containment and control, particularly crime mapping, hot-spots-policing, biometric data gathering, and police street-stops. I investigate how such tactics at times literally reach into the body, investigating, disciplining, and recording biometric, social, and spatial data. How is this technological profiling experienced in everyday life? In what ways do 'dangerous' bodies move through or become constrained within public city space? This was the topic of my article in Political Geography. I have since conducted fieldwork with children and police in Cincinnati, focusing on children's embodied experiences of policing and surveillance, and their everyday refusals of such securitizing regimes.

 

Selected Publications:

Sole-Authored Publications

Kaufman, E (2021) Staying with the Trouble of Collegiality and Care in Academia. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

Kaufman, E (2020) Police Geographies. Introductory Essay to the forum “Police Geographies.” Society and Space Open Site, edited by Emily Kaufman.

Kaufman, E (2020) Review of Bodies as Evidence: Security, Knowledge, and Power. Maguire, M., Rao, U., Zurawski, N. (Eds.) for Social and Cultural Geography

Kaufman, E (2018) Review Essay of Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall. In Review Forum for Environment and Planning D: Society and Space organized by Mat Coleman

Kaufman, E (2017) Data-Driven or Data-Justified? Antipode Intervention Symposium: "Algorithmic Governance" organized by Jeremy Crampton and Andrea Miller.  

Kaufman, E (2016) Policing Mobilities Through Bio-Spatial Profiling in New York City. Political Geography 55, 72-81

Kaufman, E (2015) Bryant Park as a Site of Production: Revenue and Social Control. Oñati Socio-Legal Series, 26 (4)

Kaufman, E (2013) The Dangers of Desiring the Law's Discipline. Book review of Yvonne Zylan's States of Passion: Law, Identity, and the Social Construction of Desire. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 26 (4)

Co-Authored and Lead-Authored Publications

Kaufman, E., Nguyen, N. “Biometric Technologies.” Oxford Bibliographies in "Geography". Ed. Barney Warf. New York: Oxford University Press, 10/30/19. 

Crampton, J, Huntley, E, and Kaufman, E (2017) Societal Impacts and Ethics of GIS. Reference Module in Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences. Elsevier; Online

Kaufman, E. and Nelson, L (2012). Malthus, gender and the demarcation of ‘dangerous’ bodies in 1996 US welfare reform. Gender, Place & Culture 19 (4)