
Dissertation Title: Bringing it Home: How Family Values Shape Policing
Committee: Kristen Schilt, Robert Vargas, Eman Abdelhadi
In my dissertation, I illustrate how police power in the United States is sustained through its relationship with the white, heteropatriarchal, nuclear family. In it, I argue that “the family”—as both a discourse and a social structure—plays a central role in maintaining and reproducing police power, a phenomenon that is particularly apparent in instances of gender-based violence perpetrated by police. I use mixed qualitative methods to leverage three primary sources of data: I conducted 102 in-depth interviews with Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers; spouses of police officers in Chicago; and advocates responding to police violence. Using public records requests, I obtained administrative records from 552 complaints made against police officers that included gender-based violence. Finally, I triangulated these data using content analysis of online debates about gender-based violence and police legitimacy. I use these data sources to show how the logics of “the family” shape police power across interpersonal interactions, institutional bureaucracy, and public discourse.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
Fox, Anna. 2025. “Anti-Black and Blue: Neighborhood Identity and Local Racial Ideologies in Chicago’s Police Neighborhoods.” Social Problems. OnlineFirst. doi: 10.1093/socpro/spae076
Abdelhadi, Eman and Anna Fox. 2024. “Walking the Orientalism Tightrope: How Muslim Americans Construct Gender Ideologies.” Gender & Society, 38(6), 902-934. doi: 10.1177/08912432241290544.