Will Tchakirides

Exploring the History of Policing & Resistance to Police Power

research projects    ·    public history    ·    experience

Dr. Will Tchakirides is a historian who writes about how the state and invested publics have made and re-made police power in the 20th century US. His research explores the political, institutional, and cultural foundations of police legitimacy, as well as how Black Americans and comrades in struggle have challenged state violence and built towards more self-determined community safety structures free of police coercion.

Learn about background & interests

He is also a public historian with over a decade of digital humanities, oral history, and archives experience. He has collaborated on projects that have helped institutions and organizations build more usable, complete interpretations of the past on their own terms. Currently, he assists on the Our Shared Future: Reckoning with our Racial Past initiative at the Smithsonian Institution.

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My dissertation explores the origins and maintenance of police power in Milwaukee, WI and its contingent relationship to Black-led struggles for accountability across the city’s long history of civil rights insurgency.
More on “Accountable to No One”

Let’s connect

Follow on Twitter @willtchak, or reach out by email: tchakiridesw@si.edu