Since this fall, Magda Boutros is a new permanent researcher, joining the CRIS team. 
In addition to her personal page and C.V., Magda Boutros agreed to answer a few questions to better present her field of study and her ongoing / future projects.

• Can you tell us a little more about your background before joining CRIS?

Before getting into academia I worked as a human rights researcher in Egypt on issues of policing, criminal justice, and prison conditions, including during the 2011 revolution. I decided to get a PhD in sociology because I wanted to better understand how these institutions function, and how people organise collectively to resist the violence and inequalities that they produce. I got my PhD from Northwestern University; then I spent one year at Brown University as a postdoc, before taking on a faculty position at the University of Washington in 2021. I joined CRIS in September 2023.

• How would you describe your area of expertise and your main field of investigation?

My research examines the violence and inequalities produced and reproduced by policing and criminal justice institutions, and how people act collectively to challenge them.
I'm currently finalising a book about French movements against racialised policing, which compares three activist coalitions. The book analyses how activists challenge the power of the police to determine what is known, and what remains unknown, about policing and the inequalities it generates - how they produce evidence of the policing practices they denounce, and how their knowledge-making practices shape their discourse and their influence on the political debate.
Previously, I studied how Egyptian activists developed novel tactics to make up for the police's failure to protect women from sexual violence in public spaces, through "intervention teams" that they deployed during protests and in large crowds.

• What do you particularly want to develop in terms of research over the next few years? What work will mark the beginning of your career at CRIS?

So far, my work has focused on activist movements against policing. In my upcoming projects, I intend to focus more on analysing policing practices that reproduce violence and inequalities, and on the mechanisms that undergird these practices. For example, I'm currently involved in a collaborative project with Aline Daillère on the "eviction of undesirables" from public spaces (the police's term, not mine), through identity checks, detention in police custody, and monetary fines. We're looking at why these practices are growing in France over the past decade, what they look like in practice, who they target, and what their consequences are for marginalised groups. 

• What current events are currently attracting your attention in the public arena, that you're following, or that raise questions for you?

Right now, the extreme violence and destruction unleashed in the Middle East is taking all my attention. It raises similar questions that I work on, about state violence and how racialisation processes help justify and normalise it.