Policing the Grocery Store

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Dr. Maggie Dickinson is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Stella and Charles Guttman Community College, City University of New York. 

Policing the Grocery Store is an ethnographic exploration of the practices of surveillance, criminalization, and resistance that take place in grocery stores in the urban United States. This project takes up the grocery store as a site of enclosure that relies on various forms of policing and criminalization in order to reproduce a system in which access to food is dependent on access to cash. Interviews with store employees, owners, security guards, shoppers, and shoplifters explore the significance of those moments when people take food without paying for it, the institutional responses to these moments, and the political subjectivities that are constructed along the way. Policing Food asks how everyday shoppers, eaters, shoplifters, and grocery store employees reproduce and resist large scale corporate food systems that continually produce hunger in the midst of plenty.