'' ''

The Department of Sociology Fall 2023 Colloquium Series Presents: Dr. Darwin Baluran

On Monday, November 6, 2023, the Sociology Colloquium Series will feature Dr. Darwin Baluran. Dr. Darwin A. Baluran is a postdoctoral scholar at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. He earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from Vanderbilt University and a Bachelor of Science in Health Systems Management from Loyola University Chicago, where he was also a McNair scholar. He conducts research at the intersection of race, health, and criminology/criminal justice. And his work engages the literatures from the sociology of race, ethnicity, and migration; criminology, law, and society; policing and criminal justice; Ethnic Studies; medical sociology; and demography. His transdisciplinary scholarship aims to theoretically unpack and empirically analyze the logics that uphold racial domination to uncover the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality across various domains of social life, from criminal legal contact to health and mortality. His research has been published in Demography, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, The British Journal of Criminology, and Population Research and Policy Review, among others.

Colloquia Title and Topic:

"The Relational Racialization of Docility and Danger:
Examining How Cues of Categories Underpin Race Making in Police-Civilian Encounters"

Research suggests that cues of racial typicality are central to the logic of racism. But how are such cues read and interpreted in social interactions, especially police-civilian encounters? And what do they reveal about racial meaning making processes? This article uncovers overlooked dimensions of race-making in the criminal legal system by unpacking the racial dynamics between Asian-descent people and the police. While not typically conceived as targets, racial typicality differences between Asian-origin people may shape their police encounters. Analyzing in-depth interviews with 63 Asian-descent adults from across the United States, I theorize how race operates like a language, whereby cues of Asian-ness are read and interpreted to situate individuals along a spectrum of docility and danger. I argue that police-civilian interactions constitute micro-level racial projects whereby social resources are distributed according to racial status; and I elaborate how intersecting dynamics of class, gender, and anti-Blackness undergird the relational racialization of Asian-ness. This study contributes to a growing sociological literature that interrogates notions of racial groupness and their implications for the study of inequality. By focusing on overlooked Asian-origin peoples, it also forges a more nuanced and expansive theoretical conception of policing and race making in the American criminal legal system.