Christina Aushana is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Barbara in the Department of Sociology supported by the mentorship of Dr. Geoff Raymond and Dr. Nikki Jones (African American Studies, UC Berkeley). Her work broadly analyzes racialized and gendered enactments of violence in police training and patrol practices in San Diego’s borderlands, advancing a theory of “scripted vision” to demonstrate how Latinx and anti-Black stereotypes become inscripted into police training pedagogies that inform officers’ professional vision in interaction. Grounded in performance ethnography, media studies, and feminist film historical approaches, her work brings the materials that construct police officers’ and recruits’ visual, social, and performance worlds under ethnographic analysis.

Aushana’s manuscript-in-progress interrogates how police role-play training constitutes a genre of performance wherein training officers, patrol officers, and recruits stage, rehearse, and revise racial (re)visions together, infusing nominally “colorblind” training scripts with racialized and racist fantasies. Her scholarship has been published, or is forthcoming, in the International Journal of Transitional Justice, Surveillance & Society, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, History of Photography, Routledge’s International Handbook of Police Ethnography, and Engaging Science, Technology, and Society.

Aushana earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in Communication. In 2022, she was awarded UC San Diego’s Dean’s Fellowship Award for Humanistic Studies for best dissertation for the 2021-22 academic year. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, and the Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society. Her teaching interests include: Ethnographic Methods; the Sociology of Policing; Feminist Film Theory; Black Feminist Studies; Performance Theory; and Racial Formation in Southwest Asian and North African Diasporic Communities.