CJ Reynolds receives 2022 SHF x Cultural Studies Award

This year’s winner of the SHF x Cultural Studies Award is CJ Reynolds’ ‘Mischievous Infrastructure: Tactical Secrecy through Infrastructural Friction in Police Video Systems,’ which appeared in a special issue of Cultural Studies on infrastructural politics (vol. 35 nos, 4 -5, July/September 2021).

The awarding committee, consisting of Coeditors Nabil Echchaibi and Ted Striphas, and trustees from the Stuart Hall Foundation’s Academic Committee, is pleased to have selected Reynolds’ work from among 20 eligible essays. The committee said:

‘This article was selected for developing a sustained perspective on urgent concerns around policing; race and anti-Black racisms; and state surveillance. Focusing on the way these factors become articulated and condensed in the work of video cameras worn by on-duty police officers, CJ Reynolds very effectively shows how this pervasive, embodied phenomenon reveals “the power of the secret”.

At the same time, the “infrastructure” of this aspect of purportedly “transparent” policing – including battery charging docks, video tracking management systems, and data storage logistics – can easily go awry, plagued by the vagaries of technological and human “mischief” in the system, thus creating openings for contestation and opposition.’

– awarding committee, The 2022 SHF x Cultural Studies Award

The SHF x Cultural Studies Award is a collaboration between the Stuart Hall Foundation and the Routledge/Taylor & Francis journal Cultural Studies. The award seeks to recognise an article by an early career scholar that best captures, and/or makes the most significant contribution to, Cultural Studies as Stuart Hall envisioned it, furthering Hall’s interests, commitments and spirit as a political intellectual.

On receiving this year’s award, CJ Reynolds said:

‘I am so grateful to be chosen for this year’s Stuart Hall Foundation x Cultural Studies Award. I want to sincerely thank the awards committee for their thoughtfulness and consideration, and the special issue editors who guided this piece to publication and provided deeply insightful advice, Blake Hallinan and James Gilmore.

Any comparison to Stuart Hall’s tremendously important and influential work is a true honor, and inspires me to continue striving for the standards he set as I examine the world around me. I believe in both the scholarly and the public importance of the ideas I presented in my article, “Mischievous Infrastructure: Tactical Secrecy through Infrastructural Friction in Police Video Systems,” and I appreciate the committee’s recognition and highlighting of these ideas, which I hope will assist other researchers in the future.’

– CJ Reynolds, winner of The 2022 SHF x Cultural Studies Award

Read more about CJ Reynolds.
Learn more about the SHF x Cultural Studies Award.

Top image: Artist: Anja Ventera | Cape Town, South Africa. Artwork Title: Aviveil and Other Futures