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Her research focuses on the visual and material culture of police training, policing’s cinematic history, and its impact on Black, Latinx, and Southwest Asian/Middle Eastern diasporic communities in Southern California’s borderlands. Her work explores the racialized architectures of spectatorship that structure police vision—from the patrol car’s windshield screen to screened images of violent masculinity from the cinema of policing—in dual “real/reel” time. 

 

Prof. Aushana has taught and presented on topics related to Black visual culture, African American filmmaking, the cinema of policing, experimental film, and ethnographic methods. She is thrilled to mentor students whose interests lie at the interdisciplinary crossroads of media studies, film, and social science research methods. 

 

Before joining the Media Arts & Culture Department, Prof. Aushana was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto where she worked on the Open Research Area grant “Visions of Policing,” examining how media technologies like body cameras shape practices of community oversight amongst Toronto’s diasporic and immigrant communities. She was previously a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is co-founder of the research collaboratory Feminist Theory Theater, a group of readers from different academic disciplines dedicated to staging feminist theory as an intervention in situated meaning-making in the academy and beyond.