In a compelling exploration of an oft-hidden aspect of qualitative field research, Women Fielding Danger shows how identity performances can facilitate or block field research outcomes. The book asks questions that are crucial for all women engaged in field research. Do researchers enter their field site with a totally neutral identity? Can a researcher's own identity be at odds with how interviewees see her? Could a researcher be of the "wrong" gender, sexuality, nationality, or religion for those being studied? Must some of a researcher's identities be subsumed in certain research settings? How much identity disguise is possible before a researcher violates research ethics or loses herself? Together, these questions inform the book's themes of the centrality of gender, social and political danger, the negotiation of identities, and on-site ethics. Focusing on ethnographic research across a wide range of disciplines and world regions, this deeply informed book presents practical "to-dos" and technical research strategies. In addition, it offers unique illustrations of how the political, geographic, and organizational realities of field sites shape identity negotiations and research outcomes. Understanding these dynamics, the authors show, is key to surviving the ethnographic field.

"A groundbreaking work. Its conclusions allow us to understand how state-sponsored violence is a social illness, and how easily moral boundaries can be destroyed. Our lesson is to grasp carefully how the technique of transforming individuals into evildoers is a highly rational exercise of constructed hatred, the isolation of individuals, and the blurring of the border between duty and cruelty."--Maria Pia Lara, editor of "Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives"

"It's rare enough that people study torturers. It's very dangerous fieldwork, demoralizing material to ponder over, and intellectually hazardous to put it together coherently. These authors do better than this: they come back with a book well worth thinking about. Thinking about torture these days is something we do less and less; one can only hope this book will be an antidote to so much thoughtlessness."--Darius Rejali, author of "Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran"

"The volume disturbingly reminds us that the problem of impunity is not just one that concerns the direct torturers and murderers but also all those who are complicit in the system of impunity."--Sir Nigel Rodley, United Nations Commission on Human Rights

In a compelling exploration of an oft-hidden aspect of qualitative field research, Women Fielding Danger shows how identity performances can facilitate or block field research outcomes. The book asks questions that are crucial for all women engaged in field research. Do researchers enter their field site with a totally neutral identity? Can a researcher's own identity be at odds with how interviewees see her? Could a researcher be of the "wrong" gender, sexuality, nationality, or religion for those being studied? Must some of a researcher's identities be subsumed in certain research settings? How much identity disguise is possible before a researcher violates research ethics or loses herself? Together, these questions inform the book's themes of the centrality of gender, social and political danger, the negotiation of identities, and on-site ethics. Focusing on ethnographic research across a wide range of disciplines and world regions, this deeply informed book presents practical "to-dos" and technical research strategies. In addition, it offers unique illustrations of how the political, geographic, and organizational realities of field sites shape identity negotiations and research outcomes. Understanding these dynamics, the authors show, is key to surviving the ethnographic field.

Reconstructing eighty years of history, "Political Policing" examines the nature and consequences of U.S. police training in Brazil and other Latin American countries. With data from a wide range of primary sources, including previously classified U.S. and Brazilian government documents, Martha K. Huggins uncovers how U.S. strategies to gain political control through police assistance--in the name of hemispheric and national security--has spawned torture, murder, and death squads in Latin America.

After a historical review of policing in the United States and Europe over the past century, Huggins reveals how the United States, in order to protect and strengthen its position in the world system, has used police assistance to establish intelligence and other social control infrastructures in foreign countries. The U.S.-encouraged centralization of Latin American internal security systems, Huggins claims, has led to the militarization of the police and, in turn, to an increase in state-sanctioned violence. Furthermore, "Political Policing" shows how a domestic police force--when trained by another government--can lose its power over legitimate crime as it becomes a tool for the international interests of the nation that trains it.

Pointing to U.S. responsibility for violations of human rights by foreign security forces, "Political Policing" will provoke discussion among those interested in international relations, criminal justice, human rights, and the sociology of policing.