An interdisciplinary social scientist and humanist, Ben Brucato is a teacher-scholar with attention focused on surveillance, technology, and race. Currently a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he teaches primarily in the Crime, Law, and Deviance track. He is currently working on a book manuscript that has been shaped by his years of research on race and policing in the United States, and by his Race & Policing class being offered for the third time in Fall 2017. In 2016-17, his first year at UMass, he published articles in American Studies Journal and Big Data & Society, and a chapter in Why Don’t The Poor Rise Up? (AK Press, 2017).

In 2015-16, Brucato was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center For Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College. There, he continued research from his dissertation on the mediated visibility of racialized police violence. While at Amherst College, he published in Media & Communication and Surveillance & Society. The latter article won the 2015 Early Career Researcher award from the Surveillance Studies Network.

Brucato finished his PhD in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in August 2015. His dissertation is titled “Watching Police Violence: Negotiating the Politics of Visibility.” His doctoral committee was chaired by Langdon Winner, who examined the dissertation along with members Nancy D. Campbell and Mike Fortun, and outside members David Murakami-Wood and June Deery. In 2013 and 2014, Brucato was a researcher in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center. While at RPI, he published in Humanity & Society, Anarchist Studies, and Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, as well as chapters in The Surveillance Industrial Complex: A Political-Economy of Surveillance (Routledge, 2013) and Policing The Campus (Peter Lang Books, 2013).

Prior to his doctoral studies, Brucato earned a MA in Sociology at Northern Arizona University, where he also acted as the coordinator for the Laboratory for Applied Social Research. He earned an interdisciplinary Bachelor’s degree from the Honor’s College at Kent State University, with minors in Women’s Studies and Sociology, and extensive coursework in Pan-African Studies.

Brucato is on the editorial board of Criminological Encounters and on the advisory board of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. He has reviewed a number of proposals for grants and books, and many more articles for journals.

Since 2016, Brucato has coordinated graduate recruitment for the UMass Amherst Labor Center.