To Witness: Cell Phone Cameras, Immigrant Communities, and Police Accountability
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This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jessica L. Olivares can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/07/to-witness-cell-phone-cameras-immigrant-communities-and-police-accountability/. About the post: What follows is a reflection on my fieldwork in Houston, Texas, during 2018 and 2019, focusing on how anti-surveillance advocates at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas used cell phones and their cameras as resistance tools. I focus on promoting cell phone camera usage in ACLU's "Know Your Rights" workshops and through the ACLU Blue and ACLU La Migra mobile applications. Throughout the piece, I reckon with what Deborah Thomas calls “the often difficult-to-parse relationships between surveillance and witnessing” (2000: 717). Witnessing the precarity of past ethnographic junctures can highlight injustices, bring them to attention, and formulate strategies for their alleviation. Thus, bearing witness to the past moments may help gain agency over unpredictable futures.
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