Join us this Thursday, January 18th, from 14-16 hrs (German time) for the fourth RUSTLab lecture of this winter term. René Tuma will present his work on “How Visual Technologies Shape Police Oversight and Training”.
New visual technologies, including body-worn and mobile phone cameras, have led to unprecedented access to police behaviour. Public reaction to the ‘new visibility’ of use of force, crowd control and interrogation has been highly polarised, and video evidence has been used to critique police services. However, little attention has been paid to how the police themselves use visual information to evaluate officer behaviour and training.
The presentation will present initial findings/work in progress from this new international project, which aims to conduct a comparative analysis of citizen and police use of visual technology to critique and inform ‘appropriate’ police behaviour. The Berlin part of the project focuses on the role of changing interrogations and the wider discourse of a critical public in relation to visual technologies, while the Bielefeld part of the project focuses on the use of body cams.
Dr. René Tuma currently works as the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project “Visions of Policing,” funded by ORA/DFG. He is a researcher at the Department of General Sociology and the Theory of Modern Societies at the Technical University of Berlin. In the year 2020, he worked at the University of Amsterdam on the Group Violence project. He is involved in the CRC1265 at TU Berlin on the topic of control/space regarding the reconfiguration of internet infrastructure since 2022. René Tuma’s research encompasses Sociological Theory and the Sociology of Knowledge, Technology Sociology, and qualitative methods, with a specific focus on video interaction analysis.
Location: on campus (Universitätsstr. 104, 2nd floor, 44799 Bochum) and Zoom
Zoom Link
PW: RUSTlab
You will find additional resources and information on this term’s guiding theme Best Futures here on our website.