Gülden Özcan, a PhD student in Sociology, will be discussing police and the public. Gülden aims to develop a new approach to the concept of the public from the perspective of the social while situating police in the broader political context of modern state formation. With this aim, she examines the broad project of police in relation to capital accumulation, state formation, and political economy while completing a materialist reading of the public sphere abstraction by (re-)conceptualizing three major public spheres: the bourgeois public sphere as the ideal target, the proletarian public sphere as its dialectical opposite, and the market-public as its supplement.