REBECCA HANSON Assistant Professor of Sociology, Criminology, and Latin American Studies
Welcome to my site! I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida, with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law and the Center for Latin American Studies. Here you can find out about my research, teaching, and publications.
Policing & Violence in Venezuela
Since 2012 I have conducted ethnographic, interview, survey, and archival research on policing, security reform, and state violence in Venezuela. This research lays the groundwork for two current book projects. The first, Chaotic Order: Policing and Coercive Power in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, is under contract with Oxford University Press and analyzes the relationship between revolutionary politics and state violence. Analytically the book advances two contributions to scholarship across sociology, criminology, and political science. First, by showing that states strategically distribute and authorize coercive power across multiple and competing armed actors it urges scholars to reconsider when and how states seek a monopoly on violence. Second, the book shows how politics can destabilize the police's position within the state and motivate police violence against state actors. Rather than a story of unified coercive forces defending the state against its opponents, I argue that certain instances of police violence in Venezuela can only be understood as resistance to the Chavista political project.
In The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela: Revolution, Crime, and Policing During Chavismo (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), David Smilde, Verónica Zubillaga and I bring together evidence from the Venezuelan case to theorize the relationship between poverty, inequality, and violence. We challenge previous research--which has tended to attribute increasing violence to Chavista rhetoric and ideology--instead arguing that persistent historical and structural inequalities exacerbated by revolutionary politics and militarized policing provide a more compelling explanation.
More recently, my research has focused on police re-militarization in Venezuela, asking how this transition has altered policing practices and organized crime in urban and rural sectors. Findings from the research have been published in Violence: An International Journal and Nueva Sociedad, the longest-running social science journal in Latin America.
Community Policing in the Global South
Community-oriented policing is a widely celebrated approach to policing and security reform that aims to reduce crime and improve perceptions of the police. Advocates call for its adoption around the world and it is a common solution proposed by governments when police violence and anti-police protests garner media attention. However, the existing evidence for community policing is limited to a small number of countries and is largely silent on effects on trust. Working with researchers across six countries in the Global South through EGAP's Community Policing Metaketa, we designed field experiments with police agencies to study locally designed models of community policing. We find that these interventions largely failed to improve citizen-police relations and do not reduce crime. Along with colleagues, I led the implementation of the field experiment in Medellín, Colombia. During this time I supervised the collection of five sources of qualitative data: ethnographic field notes, attendance sheets, cooperation documents from community meetings, interviews, and focus groups. For more information on the field experiment in Medellín, Colombia click here.
Gender and Ethnographic Research
Why is there such silence across methods courses, texts, and public methodological conversations on sexual harassment?
Studies have shown that these experiences are common across academic fields, extending from the university to researchers’ field sites. While a significant body of scholarship provides tips and suggestions for researchers to avoid these experiences, their implications for our professional and personal lives as well as knowledge production are rarely explored. Indeed, while researchers’ bodies have long been recognized as the most important instrument in the qualitative researcher’s tool belt, these embodied experiences are often left out of field notes, analysis, and tales of the field.
In Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research (University of California Press, 2019), Patricia Richards and I use interviews with 57 qualitative researchers to interrogate this silence. We argue that the androcentric, racist, and colonial histories of qualitative research construct certain embodied experiences as polluting the researcher and her research, encouraging us to push these experiences to the side rather than recognizing them as data. In the book we advocate for an embodied approach to ethnography that reflexively engages with the ways in which researchers’ bodies shape the knowledge they produce, offering an opportunity for researchers, advisors, and educators to consider the multiple ways in which good qualitative research can be conducted. Our recent special issue published in The Journal of Men's Studies brings together articles that interrogate embodied experiences in the field and in the academy, with contributions from a range of embodied perspectives.