We write this editorial in June 2024, in the middle of an intense period of exam marking at Cambridge—and a moment of soul-searching for universities. In recent months, educational institutions across the world have scrambled to respond to the new challenges posed by ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools. At the heart of these efforts is an age-old dilemma: how do we know this is really the student's work? How do we know they aren't just faking it? But such initial attempts to suppress exam fraud open up further questions: do timed, closed-book exams genuinely reflect what students have learned, or are they a poor proxy for the real thing? Are there better ways of engaging with artificial intelligence than simply demonising it as a fake essay mill? What are the potential knock-on effects of emerging measures to mitigate exam fraud?
This special issue has given us some very timely food for thought. Centering on how ‘policing and fakes co-animate each other’ in diverse ethnographic settings, this collection disrupts two often unquestioned assumptions: ‘that the fake is self-evidently a problem, and that policing is the obvious way to address it’. Using an ethnographic and conceptual focus on ‘fake-talk’, the contributors invite us to look beyond naturalised categories of ‘real’ and ‘fake’, and to explore the larger values, politics and power dynamics at stake in different policing contexts. Doing so reveals how fakery itself needs to be produced, imagined and assessed—a process that also involves the emergence, proliferation and consolidation of multiple forms of policing. These are insights that we'll keep coming back to over the coming months, as we move from exams to elections in this corner of the world.
Policing Fakes is edited by Julia Hornberger and Sarah Hodges, and features articles by Hornberger, Hodges, Sydney Calkin, Zoë Goodman, Ushehwedu Kufakurinani and Eduardo de Oliveira Rodrigues. This issue also includes Ruben Andersson's ‘Security and Subversion in a Time of Monsters’, originally delivered as the Marilyn Strathern Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 2022.
In the reviews section of this issue, Giorgio Brocco assesses the contemporary anthropology of disability and the challenge some of its practitioners raise to notions of bodily normativity and ableism, and Nerouz Satik examines the Syrian Revolution's ongoing impact on displaced Syrians, despite its political defeat.
We hope that you enjoy this issue. Do get in touch at cja@socanth.cam.ac.uk if you have queries, comments or suggestions.