As of November 1st Laura Keesman is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology department of the University of Groningen.
At the University of Groningen, she will continue her connection to the Violent Interactions network, with research into violence, policing and embodiment, as well as broadening her focus to large-scale violent interactions such as riots. She will be part of the SCOOP program which focuses sustainable cooperation and resilient societies.
For her dissertation, she conducted an ethnography of the Dutch police, focusing on (experiences of) violent interactions by police officers. These interactions included violence against officers, and use of violence (force) by officers.
She developed a phenomenological-interactionist approach and video based methods to analyze violent police-civilian encounters and officers’ experiences. Her dissertation entitled ‘Being in control: policing bodies, emotions and violence’ will be published and defended in the coming months.
Based on her research, she published on the use of video-elicitation in police research and officers’ ‘freezing experiences’. Her latest article together with Don Weenink on foreseeing ‘situational turning points’ in police-civilian encounters was published in the co-edited Special Issue on "Visibilities of Violence" in Historical Social Research.
Read her publications:
Keesman LD and Weenink D (2022): Feel it Coming: Situational Turning Points in Police-Civilian Encounters. In Historical Social Research 47 (1): 88-110. https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.47.2022.04 Special Issue entitled "Visibilities of Violence: Microscopic Studies of Violent Events and Beyond" . Editors Rene Tuma (Universität Berlin & the Amsterdam Network), Thomas Hoebel (Hamburg Institute for Social Research) and Jo Reichertz (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI)).
Keesman, Laura D. "Action accounts of police-civilian interactions: Using video elicitation to explore police officers’ how-to knowledge." Poetics 91 (2022): 101561.
Keesman, Laura D. "‘FREEZE?’An analysis of police officers accounts of self-enclosing experiences." Policing and Society (2021): 1-16.
