Racquel Gonzales

Ph.D. in Visual Studies, 2017

Research is never all fun and games. Even when you study games. “My childhood was filled with D.A.R.E., Amber Alerts, and ‘America’s Most Wanted,’” says Racquel M. Gonzales, a Ph.D. alumna of the University of California, Irvine’s visual studies program. Her dissertation, “Playing Detective: Procedure, Reenactment, and Crime-Solving Technologies,” draws from this context of hyper-surveillance in her surroundings to explore the emergence of policing as a form of American leisure culture. An interdisciplinary scholar who was trained in cultural studies, critical race theory, and gender and sexuality studies, Gonzales’ research was inherently political. “I wanted to dig into long-standing cultural perceptions of what supposedly is and isn’t police work and how that shapes perceptions of citizenship,” she explains. “In other words, who is actually hailed to play detective and who is criminalized in order for this type of play to work?”

The question of who gets to play is still central to Gonzales' work as research historian for The . . .

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