Challenging Racism in Policing through Arts-Led Approaches - Jacqueline (Jackie) Hodgson and Rachel Lewis

Speakers
Jacqueline (Jackie) Hodgson co-directs the Centre for Operational Policing Research (COPR) at the University of Warwick, where she is Professor of Law. She has researched and written in the area of the UK, French, comparative, and European criminal justice; conducted many large-scale empirical projects in the UK and Europe; and provided expert evidence to courts and lawyers in the UK and Canada. She is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a member of the JUSTICE Council. Her current work focuses on two main projects: the gendering of police custody; and evaluating the role of arts and culture in policing initiatives designed to build trust and confidence in policing.

Dr Rachel Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Her work sits at the intersections between Sociology, Education, and Law and her research interests coalesce around themes including social (in)justice, emotion and the politics of affect, and creative practice. She is co-convenor of the British Sociological Association’s Sociology of Emotions study group and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her current research focuses on the potentials afforded by arts-based methods as a medium for scholarly engagement with policing as an object of study; and for supporting change in police practice.

Abstract 
In the context of decades of activism, inquiries, and official reports demonstrating entrenched racism within the police, our work positions arts-based approaches as both a methodology for scholarly engagement with policing, and as a medium for supporting change in police culture and practice (Hodgson and Lewis 2026; Lewis and Hodgson 2025).

In this talk, we focus particularly on Project Seshat – an academic-creative partnership involving workshops (2024-ongoing) for frontline officers to interrogate questions around racism and policing in the context of England and Wales’ national Police Race Action Plan (PRAP). Rather than utilising traditional training methods, Project Seshat uses arts-based techniques e.g. storytelling, creative writing, and forum theatre, and culminates in a ‘sharing’ of officer produced creative outputs for an invited audience.

Situating Seshat within our wider body of work on policing and arts-based approaches - Policing, Culture and Community - we explore the ways in which the workshops offer a key departure from the dominant emotional regime in policing (Angehrn et al. 2021) where (certain) emotions are suppressed (Frewin et al. 2006); and instead actively call officers to engage with and through a spectrum of feelings. Whilst remaining alive to the tensions and challenges inherent in this work, we propose that these affective encounters, through which officers are invited to make themselves vulnerable and exposed in ways that do not happen in the ordinary course of police work, offer vital possibilities for unsettling dominant narratives, for enabling officers to engage more carefully with sensitive and challenging questions around policing and racism, and for supporting more meaningful reflection from officers on their institution and on their own practice. 

References

Angehrn, A., Fletcher, A.J., Carleton, R.N. 2021. “Suck It Up, Buttercup”: Understanding and Overcoming Gender Disparities in Policing. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 18(14), 1-16

Frewin, K., Stephens, C., & Tuffin, K. 2006. Re-arranging Fear: Police Officers’ Discursive Constructions of Emotion. Policing and Society, 16(3), 243–260.

Hodgson, J.S. and Lewis, R. 2026. “Teachable moments: possibilities for police reform through arts-led police community engagement in England and Wales?” European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 1-26

Lewis, R. and Hodgson, J. S. 2025. “Arts and Policing: imagining new approaches to police-community relationships?” in Asquith, N.L., Rodgers, J., Clover, J., Cordner, G., Dwyer, A. and Ahmed, R. (eds). Routledge International Handbook of Critical Policing (New York: Routledge). Pp249-259

Police Foundation. 2022. A New Mode of Protection: Redesigning Policing and Public Safety for the 21st Century. The Police Foundation. Available from: https://www.policingreview.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/srpew_final_report.pdf (accessed 21 March 2024).