Abstract
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, was shot to death by Ferguson, Missouri police officer David Wilson following an incident in which the officer initiated contact with Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson, for allegedly walking in the middle of the street (i.e., jaywalking). The controversial shooting death of Brown resulted in public outrage, peaceful protests and civil disobedience, and renewed calls for social justice—both in the town of Ferguson and across the nation. As the storyline unfolded, peaceful demonstrators would collide with local and county police forces over multiple days and nights in late August 2014. The fallout was immediate and palpable: Peaceful protesters were doused with tear gas; numerous officers equipped with body armor and armored vehicles were caught on video spewing hateful invective at the community; reporters covering the unrest were arrested without cause. The U.S. Department of Justice eventually launched a federal Civil Rights investigation into the case.
The Michael Brown case brings to light numerous pressing concerns, including, the continued militarization of U.S. police forces, the use of social media (e.g., Twitter, with the #Ferguson hashtag coming to prominence) to chronicle in real time events as they unfolded on the ground, the entrenched governmental responses to the racial logics of late-capitalism (e.g., the “profoundly patronizing” [see Oliver, 2014] statements by Missouri Governor, Jay Nixon, who called in the National Guard to supplement the Ferguson police force), the use of brutal force on peaceful protestors, and crackdowns on the freedom of the press to cover public matters.
But as we have chronicled in this journal before (see, for example, the special issues of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, “From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin”), the prevailing issues in the case of Michael Brown go beyond Michael Brown—they are far-reaching, with historical legacies reaching back decades if not centuries: racism, racial profiling, police brutality, White supremacy, poverty, corruption, the denial of agency, the destruction of community, the terror of oppression, and so on.
Thus, in this Special Issue, we are soliciting manuscripts that help us to think our way out of our present condition, to revise the historical present toward a different end, and to engage with the pain of understanding, the pain of hope, and possibility that the future will be a better place. Moving in multiple directions at once, we seek to consider (at least) the following as they relate to both the events of Ferguson and the broader debates in U.S. culture:
a) contemporary policing (e.g., Where does the power of contemporary policing come from? Is there a partnership with the community? How is success measured—arrests, or producing a “safe” and “secure” sub/urban environment?);
b) the militarization of everyday life (e.g., arming local police forces with weapons of war, the militarized scenes in Ferguson and other U.S. cities, etc.);
c) the racial logics of late-capitalism (e.g., racial profiling, for-profit prisons and interrogation centers, White supremacy, gerrymandering, etc.)
d) media coverage of #Ferguson (e.g., the use of Twitter, failures of corporate media, etc.)
e) new forms of activism/protest (e.g., responses from the hip-hop community, youth, and global voices).
We will consider manuscripts from within or against the inter-/anti-disciplinary divides related to the above topics, especially in terms of race, gender, social class, mass media, sport, politics, education, violence, prisons, performance, history, social work, economics, and the arts (as well as others not listed here).
Manuscripts are due by January 1, 2015, with a word length of no more than 6,000 words inclusive of references, endnotes, and so forth.
Manuscripts should be submitted via email as MS-Word documents to guest editor Bryant Keith Alexander (