SSF: Health Inequality Lecture: Clara Han, Johns Hopkins U.
Claiming a Death: Rights, Small Activisims & State Violence
Thursday, February 28, 2019 · 4 - 5:30 PM
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Thursday, February 28th
Health Inequality Lecture
Clara Han, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
“Claiming a Death: Rights, Small Activisms, and State Violence”
4pm in AOK Library Gallery
How are legal claims made by criminalized, low-income residents in the face of police brutality
and death? In what way are state institutions interpenetrated by neighborhoods? This talk is
based on fieldwork conducted in a low-income neighborhood under police occupation in
Santiago, Chile. Focusing on a single case of police violence that resulted in the death of a
young man, I describe how the Victims of Violent Crime unit within the municipality took up this
case as a case of state violence, and how this unit’s actions with regard to the making of the
legal case were interpenetrated by a politics within the neighborhood that sought to claim the
deaths of young men as state violence. As such, the making of the legal case revealed and
challenged the state’s boundary between the criminal and the political.
Sponsored by the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Health Administration and Policy