Meet Lumivero’s 2024 Early Career Research Grant recipient
The 2024 Lumivero Early Career Researcher Grant was awarded to E. C. Kaufman, PhD—an Assistant Professor of Geography and Environmental Planning at Towson University. A feminist urban political geographer, Dr. Kaufman focuses on what she calls biospatial policing—the overlap of surveillance, policing, and systemic disinvestment in children’s everyday lives.
Lumivero created the Early Career Researcher Grant to support the next generation of researchers who are working to make a positive impact but often face barriers to funding. With a $20,000 award, the grant helps emerging scholars advance projects using Lumivero tools like NVivo.
Dr. Kaufman’s work is grounded in years of fieldwork in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she’s studied how children in heavily policed neighborhoods make sense of their environments. Using participatory, arts-based research methods, Dr. Kaufman captures both how surveillance and policing impacts marginalized young people and how they push back, dream, and redefine what safety means for them.
This current phase of her research—focused on deeper analysis, public dissemination, and foll-up research—is supported by the Lumivero grant and powered by the NVivo software platform. The first phase of the project was funded by the National Science Foundation, establishing a strong foundation for this next stage of inquiry into how children experience and respond to securitization in complex, often overlooked ways.
What the project explores
At its core, Dr. Kaufman’s research investigates how children experience and respond to constant surveillance in the spaces where they live, learn, and play. She describes biospatial policing as a layered form of control that includes body-worn cameras, school surveillance, predictive policing, and biometric monitoring—all intersecting to shape how children move, speak, and imagine safety.
But rather than stopping at documenting harm, Dr. Kaufman’s work also highlights resistance. “Kids resist in creative, sometimes quiet, sometimes messy ways that often get overlooked,” she says. Whether through art, storytelling, or simple routines of care, these acts push back against systems that try to define them.
This phase of her research includes returning to the same Cincinnati neighborhoods five years later to re-interview former participants—children, youth program staff, and police officers. Dr. Kaufman is also adding parents and guardians to the conversation, giving the project a more intergenerational perspective.
Following the research where it leads
Dr. Kaufman’s current work builds on a path that began with undergraduate research into welfare policy. Early in her academic career, she was drawn to how state systems controlled the lives and bodies of low-income women of color—particularly through reproductive and economic restrictions.
But during fieldwork in New York City, community members kept redirecting the conversation from welfare to policing. “It changed the focus of my research,” she says. “People made it clear that policing wasn’t separate—it was woven into how they experienced the state.”
This shift led Dr. Kaufman to develop the idea of biospatial profiling—a term that captures how policing shapes not only where people can go but how they feel and are perceived in public spaces. Children later became the central focus of her work, especially as she noticed the significance of small, everyday actions—play, drawing, caring for siblings—that don’t typically get framed as resistance but carry real meaning.
Centering ethics and participant voice
Working with children means navigating a higher ethical bar, and Dr. Kaufman has built her research design around care, consent, and collaboration. She works closely with staff at the youth programs that serve as her field sites, gaining institutional approval and setting clear boundaries for participation.
Interviews only take place after both in-person child assent and parental consent are obtained. Conversations happen in familiar, low-pressure settings with doors open and trusted adults nearby.
Her methodology shifted over time, too. While Dr. Kaufman originally considered video-recorded interviews, asking kids about surveillance while filming them felt contradictory. Instead, she uses screen recordings that show only the movement of a child's stylus as they draw, preserving privacy while still offering visual data for analysis.
Dr. Kaufman’s approach is deliberately low-pressure, child-friendly, and neurodiversity-affirming, aiming to create an environment where children feel comfortable expressing themselves without fear or coercion.
A closer look at methods and data
Dr. Kaufman’s study is deeply multi-modal, combining traditional field notes and transcripts with children’s drawings, comics, and co-created stories. In early sessions, kids are invited to draw scenes related to safety, danger, surveillance, and policing in an iterative talking-drawing process that allows children to help steer the conversation either verbally or visually. In later interviews, they collaborate on comics based on their own experiences, shaping both dialogue and imagery.
This process not only surfaces emotions and memories that might not come out in conversation alone—it also gives children a sense of ownership in how their stories are told.
For instance, in many drawings, children depicted police officers carrying knives—a detail not found in any official policy documents. Later interviews with officers confirmed that many do carry knives, sometimes for mundane purposes like cutting zip ties. When asked simply to “draw a police officer” many children’s default image was of a SWAT team officer, and even children as young as six could accurately describe (if not name) their weapons. These moments illustrate the value of using multi-modal methods to triangulate perspectives and identify gaps between policy and perception.
Alongside the child-centered materials, Dr. Kaufman collects and codes policy manuals, training documents, and security tech marketing media to provide institutional context. All of this material is coded and cross-referenced in NVivo, allowing for connections to be made across data types, stakeholder groups, and thematic categories. Her coding strategy includes descriptive codes (e.g., surveillance, mobility), analytic codes (e.g., resistance, care), and process codes that track interactions and rhythms in children’s daily lives.
How NVivo supports multi-modal research
NVivo plays a central role in Kaufman’s analytic process. With large volumes of data that span formats—interview transcripts, audio and screen recordings, children’s artwork, police training manuals, media files—NVivo helps her store, organize, and synthesize materials in a structured environment.
Dr. Kaufman uses NVivo to group participants by characteristics like age or gender and compare how different groups describe safety, danger, or authority. For example, her analysis showed that girls and gender non-conforming children were more likely to name stalking or predatory behavior, while other kids focused on weaponry or physical confrontation.
She also uses features like word trees and comparison diagrams to track emotional associations. When coding mentions of “gun,” for instance, children often linked it to “scared,” “unsafe,” or “weird.” Dr. Kaufman expects that adding more police interviews will surface contrasting associations—and NVivo’s visual tools will help her track those shifts.
One of the most innovative uses of NVivo in her work is in analyzing images. Children’s drawings and comics can be tagged and compared just like text, allowing Dr. Kaufman to detect visual patterns, map connections across cases, and reinforce insights with supporting data.
How the Lumivero grant moves the research forward
The Lumivero grant has supported Kaufman in several key areas: transcription, analysis, dissemination, and fieldwork. NVivo Transcription is being used to process remaining interview recordings, saving time that can be dedicated to coding and writing. The grant also funds travel to Cincinnati, where Kaufman will reconnect with participants and gather updated data that brings longitudinal depth to the study. She explained, “It’s amazing to have both the software and the grant to enable meaningful analysis of my own data and of the pool of relevant literature that can also be fed in to make those connections.”
Beyond these logistical benefits, the grant has enabled Kaufman to organize a traveling gallery show of the children’s artwork. This form of creative dissemination not only brings the research to a broader public but does so in a way that centers children’s perspectives and makes their experiences more accessible to non-academic audiences. The show will begin in Baltimore, with plans to move to other venues that engage with community stakeholders.
The partial relief from her teaching duties provided by the grant is perhaps its most impactful contribution. It allows Kaufman to focus on writing, thinking, and preparing her research for publication—tasks that are often sidelined in teaching-intensive positions. The grant affirms the importance of “slow scholarship,” where meaningful analysis is prioritized over speed.
Creating change through research
Dr. Kaufman sees her work as not just documenting problems—but contributing to solutions. She’s especially interested in community-based models of care that reduce the need for police involvement. The youth program she partners with in Cincinnati already offers one: meals, holiday events, art workshops, and a free store for families in need.
“I want my research to point to what’s working,” she says. “What’s keeping kids safe, healthy, and connected—and support that.”
Her findings suggest that many officers themselves feel burdened by the roles they are asked to play. Some express a desire to stop performing duties better suited to mental health professionals, admit skepticism of purported “reforms," and strategize to lower arrest numbers. Kaufman’s participation in organizations like the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing has allowed her to speak with officers who have themselves been targets of police profiling, are critical of internal racism and sexism, and share concerns about the effectiveness and ethics of the system in which they work. She distinguishes these encounters from collaboration but sees value in dialog with those who identify as working toward what scholar-activist Mariame Kaba calls "non-reformist reforms."
The goal of the project is not only to understand surveillance and policing, but to shift resources away from systems of control and toward systems of support. Kaufman hopes her research can help direct funding towards organizations that provide care, while also documenting the everyday strategies children use to keep themselves and each other safe.
Looking ahead
With the support of the Lumivero grant and NVivo research software, Dr. Kaufman’s work continues to evolve—connecting children’s voices, community efforts, and academic research into one cohesive project. As she enters this new phase, she remains focused on gaining insight into the lived realities of children that traditional research methods often overlook.
About the Lumivero Early Career Researcher Grant
Lumivero created the Early Career Researcher Grant to support the next generation of researchers who are working to make a positive impact but often face barriers to funding. With a $20,000 award, the grant helps emerging scholars advance projects using Lumivero tools like NVivo.
Past recipients have explored topics ranging from Black motherhood to childhood obesity prevention, reflecting the grant’s broad commitment to fostering meaningful, community-focused scholarship. Learn more about the Lumivero grant or read about past grantees like Dr. Jannsen’s research project, “Parents’ Barriers and Facilitators to Building Better Days.”
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