CARL Research Associates Awarded Anti-Racism Research Mini-Grant

Cassandra Arroyo and Jarell Skinner-Roy were awarded Anti-Racism Research Mini-Grants from the U-M School of Education to study campus policing and racial geographies. The grants program supports education research projects and scholarship by graduate students that will contribute to the improvement of education through an antiracist lens. This program is being launched in response to a need to interrogate the influence that anti-Blackness has on contemporary approaches to schooling in K-12 and higher education contexts. The program is sponsored by the School of Education’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Justice and the Racial and Social Justice Institute.

Safety for whom? Critical Spatial and Qualitative Exploration of Campus Policing, Racial Geographies, Surveillance, and Institutional Rhetoric.

Cassandra Arroyo and Jarell Skinner-Roy

This mixed-methods study critically examines the implications of campus and city policing at the University of Michigan on marginalized students and the ways in which institutional rhetoric regarding policing lessens or furthers this marginalization. Through spatial analysis, discourse analysis, and semi-structured interviews, this study seeks to answer the following research questions: 1) What are the relationships between campus/city police department's jurisdiction and on-/off-campus arrests?; 2) Are there “hot spot” areas of arrests by race/ethnicity, specifically for Black and Brown students?; 3) How does institutional rhetoric regarding campus policing support or disrupt larger patterns of racism, power, and privilege?; 4) How do students’ perceptions of police presence inform our understanding of racial safety? Given the ways in which campus policing has been and continues to be racialized, this study contributes to the dearth of empirical research on this topic by using spatial and qualitative analyses, particularly through an anti-racist lens.