Cross-cultural encounters in everyday urban policing

This paper is focusing on the way in which securitization is performed, experienced and felt in everyday embodied encounters. It explores encounters between citizens and urban authorities – here represented by police officers holding different positions in relation to the public. The context of the research is public spaces marked as a potential threat to the security of the city. That can be streets, squares or neighborhoods represented as ‘ghettoes’ in the public debate. The research object is encounters with the authorities (in which majority and minority agents can take different positions) and the experiences, emotions and power relations lived out in these encounters. The methods are interviews with both police officers and citizens and observation in the field of cross-cultural encounters. To achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning horizons circumscribing the encounters, we interpret them through the lens of theories of embodied encounters, emotions and different modes of violence and power relations.