Hannah Fedder Williams
Hannah Fedder Williams, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow in the sociolinguistics concentration at Georgetown University, where she also completed her doctoral studies. Hannah is passionate about issues of social justice at the intersection of language and the law. As a discourse analyst, she is particularly interested in how people construct and invoke social categories like race and gender to make sense of the world around them, and how knowledge about those categories is (re)produced interactionally, especially in institutional discourse. Hannah hopes to pursue practical applications of her work in the field of law enforcement and other legal contexts.
Williams, H. (2026). Making Sense of the Police: The Invocation of Race in Talk about Policing. Linguistics. hdl.handle.net/10822/1110780
Talk about law enforcement & policing is not simply a recounting of experiences, but a discursive process through which race and institutional relations are made meaningful. Drawing on 22 interviews with police officers and citizens in the Washington, D.C. area, this study employs Membership Categorization Analysis to examine how participants invoke racial categories when discussing policing. The analysis investigates how citizens use race to account for police treatment, how officers negotiate the relevance of race to their professional identities, and how they address the moral implications of police killings of Black men. The findings illuminate how racialized understandings of policing are discursively (re)constructed and reinforced through everyday talk.
Brooks, R. Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City. New York: Penguin Press, 2021. ISBN: 9780525557852 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53732819-tangled-up-in-blue
In Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City, law professor and journalist Rosa Brooks draws on her experience as a reserve police officer in Washington, D.C., to examine the complexities of American policing. For linguists, the book offers a valuable perspective on how police officers make sense of their professional roles and experiences, and how institutional cultures shape their understanding of the communities they serve. By exploring the relationship between policing, race, and social inequality, Brooks’s account also invites reflection on how language, social categories, and everyday interactions influence perceptions of law enforcement and the relationship between police and the public.