Article

Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected

January 2012

Authors:

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Social Death tackles one of the core paradoxes of social justice struggles and scholarship-that the battle to end oppression shares the moral grammar that structures exploitation and sanctions state violence. Lisa Marie Cacho forcefully argues that the demands for personhood for those who, in the eyes of society, have little value, depend on capitalist and heteropatriarchal measures of worth. With poignant case studies, Cacho illustrates that our very understanding of personhood is premised upon the unchallenged devaluation of criminalized populations of color. Hence, the reliance of rights-based politics on notions of who is and is not a deserving member of society inadvertently replicates the logic that creates and normalizes states of social and literal death. Her understanding of inalienable rights and personhood provides us the much-needed comparative analytical and ethical tools to understand the racialized and nationalized tensions between racial groups. Driven by a radical, relentless critique, Social Death challenges us to imagine a heretofore "unthinkable" politics and ethics that do not rest on neoliberal arguments about worth, but rather emerge from the insurgent experiences of those negated persons who do not live by the norms that determine the productive, patriotic, law abiding, and family-oriented subject.

Realness, wrongness, justice exploring criminalization as a mediated politics of vulnerability

Thesis

Full-text available

Mar 2022

Kathryn Claire Higgins

This thesis makes an empirically grounded attempt to rethink the problem of ‘criminalization’— what it is, how it works, and the kinds of political work it performs—from the perspective of media culture. Informed by an abolitionist ethic, it explores the role played by news media in building, maintaining, and potentially transforming, the justificatory basis for different forms of security practice. More specifically, it investigates how journalistic representations of crime events work to negotiate, in and through public culture, the imaginative conditions of possibility for policing, incarceration, punitive deportation, and other strategies of so-called ‘crime control’. Its major theoretical contributions are a radically expanded understanding of what it means to culturally ‘criminalize’, as well as the ‘mediated security imaginary’ as a new critical heuristic for understanding the relationship between ways of communicating (in)security, on the one hand, and way of acting upon it, on the other. Together, these two contributions open new horizons (both scholarly and practical) for the cultural resistance of criminalization as an endemic, yet ultimately arbitrary, logic of contemporary social and political life. Empirically, these contributions unfold through a close analysis of one specific case of mediated criminalization: the construction of ‘African gang crime’ in and through the Australian press. Since beginning to arrive in Australia in significant numbers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, members of Australia’s Black African diaspora have been subject to persistent negative media attention, with news narratives focussing on perceived issues of juvenile delinquency and gang activity. The analysis approaches news media representations of ‘African gang crime’ events (both print and televisual) as sites of vulnerability politics, where different and sometimes conflictual accounts of social vulnerability struggle for public recognition. Deploying an ‘analytics of mediation’ (Chouliaraki, 2010) which combines granular multi-modal text analysis with the critical analysis of discourse (CDA), the thesis explicates how criminalization operates as a mediated politics of vulnerability across three key dimensions: first, through the negotiation of vulnerability as a political condition, or its constructed sense of “realness”; second, through the negotiation of vulnerability as a moral condition, or its constructed sense of “wrongness”; and finally, through the positioning of vulnerability as a practical epistemology of justification, or as a justificatory basis for different kinds of social practice. As the practices we have historically called criminal justice experience a moment of radical normative instability, this thesis argues that the mediation of criminality will have a critical role to play in determining its longer political legacy. To the wealth of political economy critiques of policing and prisons, the thesis accentuates ‘imaginability’ as an important critical horizon for our efforts to transform the practices through which we pursue safety and justice, and practices of mediated representation as crucial to how this horizon might be remade. Amid heated debates about the status of ‘the victim’ in contemporary political life, it also deploys a critique of mediated (in)security to consider the wider historical significance of a particular, premediated formation of white victimhood that expresses itself in a subjunctive mood: a victimcould, wherein it is the very possibility of injury (rather than the fact or the likelihood) that subverts the promises of whiteness in contemporary Australian life to position its subjects as ‘wronged’.

The Essential Crowd: Service Workers and Social Death in Pandemic Times

Article

Full-text available

May 2022

During the spring of 2020, public messaging in the United States regarding COVID-19 conveyed the idea that pandemics and viral infections strike people from ‘all walks of life’ and that ‘diseases know no borders’. Corporations and media outlets disseminated the message that ‘we are all in this together’. While there might be some truth in these messages, they have also been challenged as existing social inequalities have been exposed by the impacts of COVID-19. The slogan ‘we are all in this together’—which apportions risk equally—is undermined when we consider the ‘social apparatus’ that informs people’s everyday lives. While people from some walks of life have been afforded the opportunity to telework, for instance, others have been required to report physically to workplaces. Given the tag ‘essential workers’, these people often work in places that carry greater risk of infection, partly because these spaces are some of the few remaining in which crowds continue to gather during the global pandemic. We use Lisa Marie Cacho’s (2012) formulation of the concept of ‘social death’ to offer a working theoretical model of essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We engage with Cacho’s model of ‘social death’ to highlight the blurred lines, in times of crisis, between those rendered valuable and valueless (or disposable).

Case Studies in Social Death: The Criminalization and Dehumanization of Six Black and Latino Boys

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2022
Urban Rev

Gabby Medina Falzone

To fully grasp the systems of oppression youth of color must navigate, educators must consider their experiences outside as well as inside the classroom. This paper adds to the small but growing body of literature across fields highlighting how Black and Latinx youth are simultaneously positioned by schools and the justice system as criminals that must be contained and removed from school and society. This paper argues that the concept of social death, which refers to social suffering as a result of criminalization and dehumanization, helps contextualize the process by which carceral oppression manifests in students’ lives. Based on an interview study with thirty adults who were first incarcerated as adolescents, this paper focuses on three Black and three Latino male participants’ experiences with social death in schools and their neighborhoods.

MAKING PROPERTY OUTLAWS: Law and Relegation

Article

Sep 2021

Drawing from community‐based research in the Downtown Eastside, the poorest part of Vancouver, Canada, a neighbourhood long demonized as an ‘outlaw zone’, we suggest that what may appear to be illegal property practices in the area's infamous Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels are, in fact, harder to detach from formal legality than supposed. We characterize the state's withdrawal of tenancy law from SRO in the 1970s as productive of property outlaws. A form of legal relegation, outlawry places SRO residents in a space of lesser protection, stripping them of rights. A space of decades of systematic legal relegation, the outlaw zone is a product of law, not its antithesis, predicated on organized forms of devaluation and discrimination.

The black holes of Lesbos: life and death at Moria camp : Border violence, asylum, and racisms at the edge of postcolonial Europe

Article

Jul 2021

Edgar Córdova Morales

The EU-Turkey Deal of 2016 led to the enactment of a restrictive and specific asylum process for the Greek island of Lesbos, making the former Moria camp a detention center for thousands of migrants who failed to access international protection. Based on ethnographic evidence, I analyze and propose that the asylum process in Lesbos—a postcolonial border space under EU interference and control—derives from the colonial system of white supremacy. Based on historical and re-actualized racializations of migrant populations from different countries of the global south, the aim of the Greek asylum process has been to subject migrant populations in Moria to various processes of control, detention, illegalization and ultimately exposure to premature socio-physical death as in black holes: historical spaces of anti-black racism and humanitarian abandonment in the most hidden layers of Moria.

Fronteiras da cidadania: o cotidiano migratório na "Baixada do Glicério", centro da cidade de São Paulo

Thesis

Full-text available

Oct 2022

Caio Fernandes

O cenário das migrações internacionais para o Brasil, desde o início da década de 2010, tem apresentado profundas alterações tanto quantitativas, como qualitativas com relação àquele que perdurou até os anos 2000. O aumento no número de migrantes veio acompanhado de diversas medidas (formais e informais) que amplificaram as formas de gestão da migração e da própria caracterização do fenômeno frente a um crescente interesse sobre o tema. Novos lugares, sujeitos e mediadores passam a compor essa cartografia migratória, suscitando muitas questões a serem debatidas na escala internacional, nacional e local. Os caminhos, soluções, possibilidades e restrições produzidas por esses atores e pelos próprios migrantes passam a contribuir decisivamente para a composição de um “cotidiano migratório”, formado não somente pelos migrantes, mas por todo um conjunto de atores que fazem a mediação entre a condição de migrante e as desigualdades do mundo social. Diante desse contexto emergente, a cidade de São Paulo tem se tornado referência seja na elaboração de diferentes políticas públicas específicas para migrantes, seja na atuação de diferentes coletivos, igrejas, programas sociais. Além disso, em uma conjuntura de aumento das migrações em direção ao Brasil a cidade tem reforçado seu papel como um dos principais lugares de recebimento e trânsito de migrantes. Sendo assim, metodologicamente foi realizado um trabalho etnográfico na “Baixada do Glicério”, bairro situado no centro da cidade de São Paulo. Mais especificamente, o trabalho de campo centrou atenção em dois locais: i) Missão Paz, complexo religioso que oferece diversos serviços para migrantes na cidade. ii) Centro de Estudos de Cultural da Guiné (CECG), criado por migrantes de Guiné Conacri que residem no Glicério. A partir do enfoque nas trajetórias migrantes, busco compreender suas experiências nesse cotidiano, sobretudo as maneiras pelas quais negociam os direitos e a produzem pertencimentos territoriais que não excluem o Estado Nacional, mas que a ele não se reduzem. Teoricamente, mobilizo o conceito de cidadania como norteador de análise. Quando compreendido sob uma lógica formal, cidadania implica a filiação territorial a um Estado Nacional por meio da nacionalidade e a promoção de direitos em busca da igualdade a esse grupo de pessoas, os cidadãos. Por outro lado, argumento, conjuntamente a uma série de autores, que ao contrário da promoção da igualdade, a cidadania se constitui a partir da reprodução de diferenças materiais e simbólicas. Desse modo, somam-se à nacionalidade outros marcadores de diferença como: raça, sexualidade, classe, idade, lugar de origem, entre outros, que operam na diversificação e vivência desigual dos direitos. Por fim, ao acompanhar as trajetórias nesse cotidiano migratório identificou-se a coexistência de normatividades, códigos, escalas, pertencimentos. Quando observadas a partir dos pequenos gestos, práticas e micro relações explicitam-se múltiplas espacialidades políticas que transitam entre: formal e informal; doméstico e público; político e religioso; desejado e indesejado; local e transnacional caracterizando: i) maneiras pelas quais o rotineiro e o banal influenciam no ordenamento socioespacial dos lugares. ii) formas múltiplas de negociação dos direitos e do pertencimento através das “fronteiras da cidadania”.

Deployments of Multiracial Masculinity and Anti-Black Violence: The Racial Framings of Barack Obama, George Zimmerman, and Daunte Wright

Article

Full-text available

May 2022

Jasmine Mitchell

In this article, I examine how political and media discourses of multiraciality are deployed to justify guilt and innocence. I trace the deployment of multiraciality to determine who is deserving of life or death in media coverage, political rhetoric, and court records during Obama’s presidency, in George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal, and in the 2021 killing of Daunte Wright. I examine the weaponization of discourses of multiracial identities as tools of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Through such weaponization, the construction of the multiracial man as an index of racial progress and post-racism evident in the Barack Obama era enabled the violence and miscarriages of justice in the killings of Trayvon Martin and Daunte Wright. I consider how transnational and U.S. narratives of multiraciality, joined with anti-Blackness and white supremacy, enabled the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Furthermore, I examine how white womanhood and fears of Black masculinity facilitated the sympathy garnered towards Kim Potter. In considering the killing of Daunte Wright, this paper shows how multiraciality and racial malleability are valuable only when utilized for preserving racial hierarchies.

“In and Out of Crisis”: Life Course Criminalization for Jefas in the Barrio

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2022
Crit Criminol

Katherine L. Maldonado-Fabela

Scholars have documented how violence, criminalization, and other forms of control impact the life trajectories of criminalized women. Less research exists on the ways that processes of criminalization affect the health of mothers across the life course. This study examines how the legal constructions of criminalized labels such as gang affiliation, are a process of long-term violence and threat of violence and second, how short and long-term criminalization affects family health–what I refer to as life course criminalization. This qualitative study is based on photo elicitation life history testimonios with 13 gang affiliated, system-impacted Chicana/Latina mothers from South Central Los Angeles, California and connects life course theory with feminist abolitionist decolonial perspectives. It documents how crises perpetuated by multi-institutional violence and other forms of violence influence relations between legal, social, and health related experiences for system-impacted mothers and their families. Through their testimonios they show the intergenerational mechanisms that connect the body’s health, family surveillance, and criminalization processes to survival, and spiritual resistance.

Violência, migrações e racismo: conexões recorrentes entre passado e presente.

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2022

Em janeiro de 2022, o refugiado Congolês Moïse Kabagambe, 24 anos, foi brutalmente espancado até a morte, após reivindicar o recebimento de diárias de trabalho não pagas em um quiosque na praia da Barra da Tijuca, Zona Oeste do Rio de Janeiro. A triste coleção de agressões a migrantes e refugiados (em sua maioria pessoas negras), não permite considerar o revoltante caso de Moïse como algo isolado. Infelizmente, acima está apenas uma pequena seleção de casos recorrentes no Brasil e que, mais do que alertarem para o risco de morte e violência, apresentam um campo muito mais amplo sobre experiências de vida na precariedade.

MÄNNISKAN OCH ETIKEN, red. Dan-Erik Andersson & Johanna Gustafsson Lundberg

Chapter

Jan 2022

Elisabeth Gerle

Vanishment: Girls, Punishment, and the Education State

Article

Jul 2019

Sabina E. Vaught

Background/Context This article emerges from several scholarly traditions, chief among them feminist and critical ethnography; school–prison nexus; and critical feminist and race theories. Focus of Study The larger study that informs this article was an 18-month ethnographic inquiry into youth prison schooling in one state. This study explored both the specifics of schooling inside the system and attended to the ways in which it mimicked, mirrored, or resonated with schooling on the outside—offering a qualitative map of power and discipline in schooling writ large. The story that undergirds this article is drawn from that larger study. Here, I attend carefully to one ethnographic moment to conceptualize broad questions of punishment, gender, race, and sexual identity. Setting The research took place inside multiple institutions across one state's juvenile detention and prison system. The article organizes its inquiries around an ethnographic vignette from Inside one state's largest juvenile detention facility. Research Design The research that informs this article is both a long-term critical ethnographic study and rigorous theoretical research across several areas. Conclusions I both begin and conclude this article by offering an initial conceptualization of one form of punishment: vanishment. Vanishment is a punishment that works in concert with imprisonment, banishment, and treatment to organize the disciplinary practices of U.S. school and society. In considering vanishment, the article offers an initial development of the construct and reflects on inquiries that might begin to excavate its seemingly hidden mechanisms. I invite consideration of this punishment across multiple sites and through a variety of approaches.

An Unthinkable Politics for Multispecies Flourishing within and beyond Colonial-Capitalist Ruins

Article

Sep 2021

Kathryn Gillespie

Colonial-capitalist animal agriculture is a site of ruin and a process of ruination. Farmed animals at the heart of these agricultural systems become sites of production and capital accumulation, their bodies genetically coded for commoditization and their short lives organized around logics of extraction. Farmed animals in settler states like the United States are simultaneously colonized subjects and settler-descendants and, as such, occupy a complex position in imaginaries of anticolonial futures. This article considers the possibility of flourishing for those farmed species never meant to flourish, explaining first how animal agriculture as a taken-for-granted institution forms part of the fabric of the ruination delivered by colonial-capitalism. And yet, even as animals’ bodies are devastated by production and consumption processes, there exist glimmers of possibility for radically different conceptualizations of farmed animals’ lives in multispecies worlds outside of farming contexts. This article analyzes sanctuaries for formerly farmed animals as one such site of possibility. Sanctuaries mark out geographic spaces as sites of hope that manifest in spite of and actively against colonial-capitalist logics, where human–animal relationships are radically redefined, articulated, and practiced—indeed, where animals’ lives are organized around how they can flourish. As such, this article calls for an unthinkable anticolonial politics of multispecies flourishing beyond colonial-capitalism.

Materialization of racialized surveillance: Lived experiences of home imprisonment

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2021

Subhah Wadhawan

Racialization, surveillance, and securitization may be distinct theoretical concepts, but they are nevertheless significantly intertwined. Race, as a mode of thinking and governance, largely informs the practices of securitization, whereby surveilling racialized bodies is an immanent task of the securitization process. To demonstrate this relationship, I interviewed three of the men from the infamous Canadian “Secret Trial 5” Security Certificate cases and their family members. I investigate their lived experiences of home imprisonment, examining how their home became a key site for the operation and deployment of racialized surveillance. Their experiences illustrate how surveillance emerges as a practice of securitization, where racialized “Others” are reaffirmed as threats to and subjects of unfettered surveillance practices. As the only research endeavor to interview Canada’s security certificate detainees and their families, this article demonstrates how securitization materializes through the transformation of the home into a prison; this is achieved through the imposition of carceral practices and a penal architecture within the home and through eroding belonging and safety for the people living under this type of regime. Moreover, given that most studies focusing on the experiences of securitization are restricted to the experiences of the incarcerated individuals, these studies often exclude, and by extension, silence the voices of the families also touched by these processes. Thus, this article illuminates that, albeit, in different magnitudes, families also undergo the pains of imprisonment.

Rethinking the “crisis of expertise”: a relational approach

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2023
THEOR SOC

Lisa Stampnitzky

Concerns about a “crisis of expertise” have been raised recently in both scholarship and public debate. This article asks why there is such a widespread perception that expertise is in crisis, and why this “crisis” has posed such a difficult puzzle for sociology to explain. It argues that what has been interpreted as a crisis is better understood as a transformation: the dissolution of a regime of expertise organized around practices of social integration, and its displacement by a new regime organized around practices of expulsion. This article introduces a new framework that envisages expertise as an historically constituted phenomenon, which is the outcome of relational networks (which I call alliances). It argues that this approach, in which expertise(s) are understood as the historically contingent outcome of alliances between knowledge producers, problems, and modes of intervention, can better account for recent shifts. It does this by enabling us to reinterpret what has been described as a general crisis of expertise as, instead, the observed effects of the dissolution of specific alliances of knowledge and practice. This article demonstrates the power of this relational approach through two case studies: the dissolution of the expert alliances organized around the rehabilitative approach to crime and the counterinsurgency approach to irregular political violence. In each these cases, it finds that, as alliances of social expertise, characterized by policies and interventions that attempted to discipline problem actors and integrate them into society, unraveled, they were displaced by new alliances that sought to manage problems through practices of exclusion. The paper concludes with a theory of why the field of sociology has had such difficulty explaining the crisis of expertise.

Qualifying deportation: How police translation of ‘dangerous foreign criminals’ led to expansive deportation practices in Spain

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022
SECUR DIALOGUE

Barak Kalir

In 2009, in a move to improve the situation regarding the deportability of illegalized migrants in Spain, a left-wing government led by the Socialist Workers’ Party drafted a new policy aimed at focusing police efforts exclusively on the deportation of ‘foreign criminals’. Ethnographically tracing the enforcement of deportation by a central police unit in Madrid, this article shows how the practical implementation of a policy that seemingly sought to limit the use of deportation in fact allowed for continuous and even reinvigorated deportation practices aimed at all categories of illegalized migrants. Operating under the idea that they were now fighting ‘dangerous criminals’, many police agents felt increasingly motivated about carrying out deportations and reassured about the morality of doing so. Rather than focusing on illegalized migrants who had been indicted for serious crimes, most police agents considered anyone with a police record to fit their target group. As a result of the specific police interpretation of the new policy, the deportability of illegalized migrants in Spain was not only increased but also left to be enforced according to the racialized and racist ideas of police agents. The article argues for the need to scrutinize all new deportation policies within Western liberal states in terms of their effect on deportability by highlighting entrenched and institutionalized forms of racism against illegalized migrants within the police force.

Rethinking visual criminalization: news images and the mediated spacetime of crime events

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2022

Kathryn Claire Higgins

This article explores the mediated spacetime of crime events to reconsider how criminalization works through visual journalism. Drawing on close analysis of 45 images from Australian newspaper reports about so-called ‘African gang crime’ events in the city of Melbourne, it develops a typology of five distinct ‘ways of looking’ at crime that news images can open for their viewers. Each extends unique imaginative demands and so conditions perceptual relationships of spatial, historical and political significance between crime events and those who watch them unfold through the news in distinct ways. Together, these ways of looking constitute an intertextual representational mechanism that the author calls kaleidoscopic visuality, holding fixed the ‘who’ and ‘what’ of crime events while endlessly shifting and destabilizing the ‘where’ and ‘when’. The concept of kaleidoscopic visuality helps clarify how and why hypermediated crime events and phenomena resist discrete and/or desecuritized interpretations of their political significance, and thus broadens existing accounts of how news images criminalize.

On the Death of Mame Mbaye: Racialism as the Ultimate Goal in the “Battle against Irregular Immigration”

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2022

Barak Kalir

On 15 March 2018, Mame Mbaye, a 35-year-old migrant from Senegal who lived in Spain for 11 years, died on a street in the centre of Madrid. A police raid on unauthorized street vendors caused panic among illegalized migrants, who ran away trying to avoid an arrest that could have led to their detention and deportation. Mbaye ran towards his home, located a few hundred meters down the road, but he never made it. The official version, endorsed by the Spanish court, is that Mbaye suffered a fatal cardiac failure. Some eyewitnesses claim the police suffocated him to death. The article explores how the pervasive and perverse exercise of racism on different levels against illegalized migrants results in their social and in some cases literal death. To fully grasp the tenacity with which racism and racial cruelty are applied in the immigration field, we must recognize that most other arenas that have historically served as breeding grounds for advancing racialism in western societies have been legally proscribed. In contrast, the anti-immigration arena allows for acting practically, discursively and politically in racializing and racist manners against some of the most vulnerable members in society: so-called 'irregular' migrants, 'failed' asylum seekers and 'non-real' refugees. The immigration field thus serves as a crucial, and perhaps the last, frontier for advancing racialism more holis-tically in western societies. Animating racialism as an operative ideology informs-consciously or not-those who staff the state apparatus, and society more broadly, to believe in and act upon racialized categories of othered people. In so doing, racialism legitimizes the social production and justifies the social death of illegalized migrants. The ultimate goal of this vicious dynamic, of inhumane treatment and judicial impunity, is to keep operational the racist notion that the lives of some people matter less than others.

¿Terminan realmente los “temores fundados de persecución” cuando las y los refugiados negros llegan a Brasil?

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2022

Caio Fernandes

El caso de Moïse hizo cruelmente explícitas las distopías de la protección de los refugiados y la «integración» social. Su madre y él huyeron de la violencia que marcaba su tierra natal. De hecho, huyeron de un tipo de violencia, pues ¿podrían su madre y él escapar completamente de la violencia? ¿Huirán algún día los inmigrantes y refugiados pobres y negros de la violencia por completo? ¿Hay siquiera espacio para que los que están en una posición marginal (social, política, económica, histórica, espacial) habiten el campo de la no violencia y realicen, en la práctica, las promesas contenidas en los conceptos políticos que predican la estabilidad y la igualdad? Después de todo, para cuerpos como el de Moïse, ¿dónde no están los «fundados temores de persecución»?

A A picturebook reveals the nature of bias

Article

Full-text available

May 2022

Cynthia K. Ryman

In order to disrupt hegemonic thinking, the foundation of biases on which this thinking is built must first be confronted. I became increasingly aware of the detrimental impact of implicit bias during a research project I conducted in a children’s literature course with preservice teachers. In this research project, I analysed the responses of the preservice teachers to a cosmopolitan approach to reading children’s literature. A cosmopolitan approach in literacy invites a reflexive consideration of personal perspectives and an opening towards learning from the perspectives of others (Hansen, 2017). In encouraging the ideals of a cosmopolitan approach to literacy, I encountered areas of resistance from the preservice teachers. These instances of resistance were often rooted in implicit bias. During the final stages of completing my research, the picturebook Milo Imagines the World by Matt de la Peña (2021) was released. Milo Imagines the World reveals how deeply held ideologies and biases impact perceptions of reality. An awareness of how biases impact one’s perception of reality is an important factor in developing greater self-awareness and combating hegemonic thinking. In this article, I provide a critical analysis of the various forms of bias encountered during my research along with a reflective exploration of the picturebook Milo Imagines the World. This picturebook and analysis provide a context for better understanding the subtle pervasiveness of biases that often contribute to the maintenance of hegemonic thinking.

Black and proud: Impact of intergenerational racism upon global majority family systems

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022

Racism is a pervasive force; its influence is felt in the lives of Global Majority people worldwide, and across generations. As Global Majority systemic psychotherapists in the UK, we take a position to stand against racism in all areas of systemic theory and practice. The ideas in this paper offer an opportunity for all systemic psychotherapists to join us in the decolonisation of theories, practices and knowledge, to step outside White Western structures that have kept Global Majority voices silenced for too long. This article reviews the damage of intergenerational racism upon the lives of Global Majority systemic psychotherapists and the Global Majority families we support. We invite systemic psychotherapy to begin drawing on the rich cacophony of Indigenous knowledge, from Africa and the Caribbean, and from East, West and South Asia to de-centre ‘White ways of knowing’.

Movimientos sociales en America Latina: perspectivas, tendencias y casos

Book

Jan 2017

MOVIMIENTOS SOCIALES EN AMÉRICA LATINA

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2017

¿AMBIENTALISMO DE LAS ONG VERSUS AMBIENTALISMO DE LOS POBRES?

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2017

Mass School Closures and the Politics of Race, Value, and Disposability in Philadelphia

Article

Jan 2019

With the expansion of charter school networks, population losses in urban district schools and stretched budgets have encouraged struggling districts to adopt closure-as-reform. School closings have received considerable attention in the media as a controversial reform, reconfiguring the educational landscapes of over 70 post-industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans. However, in the last decade, few scholars have considered the project of examining closures—their process and their effects—empirically.

“La justicia ambiental es para ti y para mí”: Translating Collective Struggles for Environmental and Energy Justice in Puerto Rico’s Jobos Bay Communities

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2021

Catalina de Onís

Rural, coastal communities in the Jobos Bay region of southeastern Puerto Rico confront disproportionate harms as an energy sacrifice zone. This space is constituted by imported fossil fuel dependency, economic and climate injustices, environmental racism, ecocide, US colonialism and imperialism, neoliberalism, and racial capitalism. In response, many grassroots actors mobilize against the toxic assault on their communities to push for alternatives beyond the suffocating status quo via apoyo mutuo [mutual support]. This survival work and movement building occur literally in “the outdoors” and in other intertwined multispecies environments, challenging narrow, oppressive colonial, and consumerist constructs that reduce “the outdoors” to recreation and thus erase the numerous ways that people labor in, honor, and defend places and spaces to lead good lives. Thus, critical examinations of communication and race/racism/racialization in and about this colonial US territory must grapple with the brutalities and pain caused by systemic and structural cruelties and translate how, where, and with whom self-determined and potentially liberatory environmental and energy justice advocacy takes shape to refuse a trauma-only narrative. Studying these embodied and emplaced efforts positions energy and power broadly construed, including in the form of collective action. This article centers on the collaborative energies of local grassroots actors and scholars who ideologically and politically align and who value working together toward anti-colonial praxis. To provide one example of how these collaborations can yield public-facing projects that contribute to struggles tied to the survival and well-being of the most impacted communities, this essay focuses on the creation of an environmental justice children’s book. This bilingual text documents and translates the pollution caused by a US-owned, coal-fired power plant and mobilizations to topple this corporate invader. The article concludes by reflecting on some of the difficulties and possibilities that emerged during multi-year coalitional relationships that inform and exceed the children’s book. To reject racist and colonial dominant assumptions and discourses about outdoor spaces as only privileged recreational areas or as a “blank slate” devoid of people and culture, this project narrates how grassroots organizers and scholars persist in continued study and struggle for power(ful) transformations in Jobos Bay and beyond.

O que temem aqueles que são temidos? Da produção do medo com relação ao migrante ao medo que sentem os migrantes.

Cover Page

Full-text available

Jul 2021

Caio Fernandes

O texto busca refletir sobre as formas pelas quais o Estado brasileiro produziu o migrante como sujeito a ser temido durante a Pandemia. Por outro lado, o texto também reflete sobre o que temem aqueles que são temidos, no caso, os migrantes, durante esse período. As angústias, os receitos, as precariedades e a necessidade de negociar a vida cotidiana durante a pandemia.

Camp Abolition: Ending Carceral Humanitarianism in Kenya (and Beyond)

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2021

Hanno Brankamp

Refugee camps are among the most prevalent institutional responses to global displacement. Despite a quasi consensus among scholars, activists, and humanitarians that camps are undesirable, and should only ever be temporary, little work has charted the political project and practices of camp abolition that challenge their spatial unfreedom. Rather than life‐supporting spatial technologies of care that unwittingly signal political failures of inclusion, camps form part of a calculated system of “carceral humanitarianism”. This article draws on experiences from Kenya where aid interventions have shaped politics, social dynamics and economic life since the 1990s. Kakuma camp and Kalobeyei settlement serve as empirical windows to explore the limits of institutional decampment and reform policies, while demonstrating that more radical, abolitionist struggles are enacted through everyday mobilisation and acts of fugitivity among refugees themselves. Advancing critical studies of humanitarianism and forced migration, this article contends that only abolishing camps and their carceral logics helps to build more viable, safe, and humane futures for people on the move. Kambi za wakimbizi ni moja ya njia za kitaasisi zilizozoeleka kukabiliana na suala la uhamiaji wa kulazimishwa wa kimataifa. Ingawaje kuna muafaka baina ya wanazuoni, wanaharakati, na watetezi wa masuala ya kibinadamu kwamba kambi hazifai, na ziwepo kwa muda mfupi tu, michango michache ya kitaaluma imefafanua mradi wa kisiasa na vitendo vya ukomeshaji kambi ambavyo vinakabili ukosefu wa uhuru. Badala ya kuwa mahali pa kuokoa na kujali maisha—penye mapungufu yaliyosababishwa na sera jumuishi zilizoshindwa—kambi ni sehemu ya mfumo wa makusudi wa misaada ya kibinadamu yenye mrengo wa kiudhibiti. Makala hii inatumia mafunzo kutoka Kenya ambapo misaada imeathiri siasa, mienendo ya jamii na maisha ya kiuchumi tangu 1990. Kambi ya Kakuma na makazi ya Kalobeyei yanatumika kama madirisha halisia kuchunguza mkomo wa kitaasisi katika sera za uondoaji kambi na za kimageuzi, ilihali ninaonyesha kwamba mapambano makali ya ukomeshaji wa kambi yanafanywa kila siku kupitia uhamasishaji na vitendo vya kikimbizi kati ya wakimbizi wenyewe. Katika kuendeleza tafakuri ya kihakiki katika masomo ya mfumo wa kibinadamu na uhamiaji wa kulazimishwa, chapisho hili linadai kwamba njia pekee ya kujenga hatima nzuri, salama na ya kibinadamu kwa watu wanaotoka sehemu moja kwenda nyingine, ni kwa kukomesha kambi na mantiki yake ya kiudhibiti.

2022, Más allá de la desaparición forzada y la tortura sexual

Book

Full-text available

Mar 2023

Julia Monárrez

¿Cómo se narran las penas y los dolores a través de la memo - ria –del testimonio político– de alguien que está ausente, o de alguien que se encuentra presente y lacerado? Este libro surgió con ese cuestionamiento en mente, con el propósito de com - prender, desde la experiencia y el trabajo de algunas organiza - ciones feministas y derechohumanistas de Colombia –en Bogotá, Medellín y Cúcuta–, los temas del sufrimiento social y la me - moria, ligados a eventos críticos que desencadenan situaciones límite, como la desaparición forzada y la tortura sexual. La guerra en Colombia (1958-2016) puede ser abordada desde este aparato epistemológico, pues nos permite reflexio - nar sobre las mujeres y los hombres (e igualmente, sobre los cuerpos leídos como transgresores de lo femenino y lo mascu - lino) que son abandonados –tanto por el Estado como por la sociedad– ante las múltiples violencias, estatales y no estatales, que los viejos y nuevos actores de la violencia engendraron. Frente a esta devastación patriarcal, capitalista-colonial, hete - ronormativa, clasista, sexista y racializada, también están presentes las narrativas testimoniales. Aquellos que interpelan los históricos sistemas estructurales de opresión, con sus consecuentes jerarquías deshumanizantes, son quienes reclaman las vidas ofendidas a través de sus acciones y sus palabras.

Necroharms: the normalisation and routinisation of social death in refugee camps on the Greek Island of Lesvos

Article

Mar 2023

Evgenia Iliadou

This paper explores the consequences of the necropolitical border regime on border crossers’ lives on the Greek island of Lesvos. It focuses on the manifold abandonments (left-to-die practices) that border crossers experience inside and beyond the refugee camps and detention centres, arguing that this inhuman and degrading treatment inflicts, normalises and naturalises disposability, humiliation, and social death. The paper combines a social harm approach, critical migration and border studies, and insights from anthropology to analyse border crossers’ lived experiences of violence. In doing so, the paper contributes to the growing literature on the politics of abandonment and disposability as a modus operandi of migration governance. It also expands on social harm typologies by introducing a new conceptual category of harm which I term ‘necroharms’.

Educating the “illegal”: Life and learning as both undocumented student and undocumented migrant worker

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2023

Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales

Though California is often regarded as the vanguard in adopting policies to support undocumented students, not all undocumented youth in California are experiencing increased educational access. I argue that undocumented community college students in the Central Valley of California navigate symmetrical experiences in the worlds of work and education—experiences that serve to keep them as exploited and subjugated low-wage workers rather than contribute to their development as educated Latino would-be professionals. In this article, I identify and discuss three parallel experiences—precarity, racialization, and subjugated inclusion—that demonstrate not only that “undocumented student” and “illegal migrant worker” are overlapping categories, but also how race and illegality come together in a way that stymies educational access for many undocumented students.

The permanently minority people: Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon , (Attempted) social death and desire to return

Article

Feb 2023

Seventy-three years, seven million people in exile; it has been this long since the Palestinian diaspora set foot. By expanding the Social Death theory to include “territory bounded culture,” this paper argues that Israeli regime is inflicting an (attempted) social death upon Palestinian refugees by dispossessing them of their lands and denying their existence. This article attempts to unlatch another portal by exhibiting the possibility of creating an anti-thesis to the Social Death theory by the Palestinian resistance. Thus, showing the very act of Israel’s attempted social death becomes the very fuel for the Palestinian resistance to social death. We also illustrate the interconnection between social death and hope to return, allowing another room for analysis of refugee’s desirability to return and the problems of universalisation of solutions to the refugee crisis, in particular the cases of Palestinian refugees in Lebanese and Jordanian refugee camps.

Social Problems in the Age of COVID: Global and Localized Perspectives

Chapter

Feb 2023

The “good refugee” ideal: How discourses of deservingness permeate Australia's refugee and asylum seeker narratives

Article

Jan 2023

While “good refugee” stories have the potential to soften attitudes toward forcibly displaced people, there are hidden implications associated with this construct that must be considered. Based on 60 qualitative interviews with asylum seekers and refugees, this paper examines the ways forced migrants adopt and reproduce “good refugee” discourses that unintentionally position their belonging as contingent upon upholding narrowly defined, and arbitrary, ideals about deservingness. By critically analysing this discourse, we highlight the importance of reconsidering the construction of refugees' deservingness along moral and neoliberal lines and instead present a case for approaches that focus on rights‐based, humanitarian grounds for refugee resettlement.

The colour of system avoidance in Canada: Investigating the importance of immigrant generation among African Canadians

Article

Oct 2022

The criminalization of Black people in Canada, and their relative distrust of systems of criminal justice, are well-established realities. Here, we problematize the monolithic construction of Blackness implied in this statement. Interrogating differences in African-born immigrants' responses on the General Social Survey, we build on existing theories regarding the 1.5 generation of immigrants in order to demonstrate that those Black immigrants who arrived as children, grew up in Canada, and participated in Canadian education, labour markets, and other institutions of socialization, are the most likely to distrust police, systems of criminal justice and Canadian institutions more generally. We theorize that, contrary to prevailing opinions regarding the ways in which distrust in Black communities stems from wariness of law enforcement in home countries, Canadian system avoidance is led by Black people who are from Canada.

Intimate extraction: Geological matter, extractive afterlives, and the denial of a Black sense of place in Southern Louisiana

Article

Oct 2022

Manannan Donoghoe

This paper centres geological matter in questions of marginality, inequality, and structural racism in the US. I follow the entanglements of geological matter with bodies, emotion laden imaginaries of place and histories of slavery and colonialism, to illustrate how contemporary Black lives are intimately connected to processes of mineral extraction. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman's concept of ‘afterlives’, I situate heightened levels of ambient toxicity from geological refinement and industrial waste as extractive afterlives, connecting commonly felt precarity around extractive worlds to broader questions of race, inequality and connections to place. Citing academic and artistic accounts of life in Southern Louisiana, an historically Black region with a large petrochemical industry, I demonstrate the relevance of geological entanglements to experiences of structural racism in the US.

Caring Housing Futures: A Radical Care Framework for Understanding Rent Control Politics in Seattle, USA

Article

Sep 2022

Samantha Thompson

Hegemonic responses to housing crises overwhelmingly rely on liberal economic logics, which preclude understandings of housing inequalities as produced by intersecting structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. This creates housing futures that replicate housing injustice, through the reproduction of housing crises that uphold racial capitalism, the settler state, and white property ownership. To address this gap, I develop a radical care framework for analysing responses to housing crises as an approach that emphasises relationality, challenges the commodification of housing, and renders different housing futures possible. Radical care is a collective response to immediate crises and precarious futures. I apply this framework to rent control debates in Seattle, USA, which highlight the complex intersections between care and housing politics in responses to housing crises. I argue that analysing housing politics through a radical care framework helps us to account for more expansive sociopolitical imaginaries and actions that point to housing futures beyond the limits of what is deemed possible in a colonial, racial capitalist housing system.

Dignity politics in immigrant detention

Article

May 2022

Romelia Solano

This essay reflects on Claire Jean Kim’s racial triangulation theory in light of the 20-year convergence between the US immigration system and the carceral state. Drawing on a non-probability sample of 70 in-depth interviews with individuals who had direct and vicarious immigrant detention experiences, I argue that immigrant detention depends on anti-Blackness to manage race-class subjugated groups’ demands for de-carceration. Interviews expose how Latinx immigrant subgroups and other immigrant subgroups are differently subjected to carceral logics in ways that compel or suppress their resistance to racial triangulation. Finally, by recentering the agency of directly impacted individuals, the essay complicates Latinx politics and sheds light on an emerging dignity politics in immigrant detention with implications for intergroup relations.

Extra-ordinary Black Vulnerability

Chapter

Jan 2022

Mukasa Mubirumusoke

This chapter interrogates the role of vulnerability in the formation of political identity and the uniqueness of black positionality. Vulnerability has been adopted as a constituent element of modern conceptions of political identity; however, this chapter argues black vulnerability exceeds the given parameters; specifically, when articulated through the works of Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson III, that is, afropessimism. The neologism extra-ordinary describes the constitutive and gratuitous qualities of black positionality within the scope of a larger political ontological order.KeywordsVulnerabilityBlacknessButlerWildersonAfropessimismPolitical ontology

Entre la casa y la calle: Latinx childhood re-memories of space and place

Article

Mar 2022
Child Geogr

This article challenges previous deficit narratives on Latinx communities by centering childhood re-memories of Latinxs and complicating our understanding of their childhood experiences in historically disinvested communities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and fieldnotes, we examined how Latinx participants recounted the impact that everyday racism, violence, patriarchy, and gentrification had on their childhoods, their neighborhoods, and their families. Although their re-memories were at least a decade old, they vividly remembered ambivalent and contradictory re-memories entre la casa y la calle. Through these re-memories, Latinx participants mapped the competing systems that shaped their experiences and how they impacted their communities. We conclude this article by exploring the resistance strategies that Latinxs deployed to negotiate these spatialities and their place in them.

What Is Social Justice Research for Asian Americans ? Critical Reflections on Cross-Racial and Cross-Ethnic Coalition Building in Community-Based Educational Spaces

Article

Mar 2022

As anti-Black ideologies continue to prevail in Asian American communities, this autoethnography explores how two Southeast Asian American (SEAA) scholar-activists and community organizers contended with anti-Blackness, racism, and social justice research in their cross-racial and cross-ethnic solidarity community-organizing and educational curriculum. Utilizing an autoethnographic approach, the authors, both educational anthropologists, engage in critical analysis of their personal experiences as scholar-activists to examine the cultural experiences of being ethnic insiders and researchers. Pheng, a second-generation queer Khmer American scholar, examines the tensions in building cross-racial and cross-ethnic solidarity in Refugee Youth Organizing Training (RYOT), a multi-ethnic community-based SEAA youth leadership program in Philadelphia, PA. She argues that transformative dialogue in support of coalition building requires SEAA youth to first grapple with their historic and contemporary trauma as the descendants of SEAA refugees in the United States. Xiong, a first-generation HMoob American, details the successes and challenges of building cross-racial solidarity as a community-engaged researcher and activist within Solidarity Holds Our Unity Together (SHOUT), a Black and SEAA nonprofit organization in Dane County, WI. She points out that cross-racial and ethnic coalition building requires maintaining long-term relationships between all communities. Pheng and Xiong situate their experiences working with each organization within the context of the Minnesota Uprising and the COVID-19 global pandemic. Noting that both critical and polarizing conversations emerged within Asian American communities post-George Floyd’s death, the authors argue that their position as scholar-activists played a central role in facilitating educational workshops and dialogues to bridge SEAA organizations and the academic community. Specifically, this paper reveals how researchers can produce anti-racist scholarship alongside their community and cultivate reciprocal relationships that benefit minoritized communities. This autoethnography offers insights on the practices of socially-just and community-engaged scholarship in addressing anti-racism and coalition building in community-based educational spaces.

“Stuck In‐Between ”: Placing the Underdocumented Youth Movement in Georgia

Article

Jan 2022

This paper draws on participant‐observation and a series of focus group interviews with TPS and DACA youth in Northeast Georgia to understand youth activism emerging from their positionality of being “stuck in‐between”. “Stuck in‐between” captures the liminal legal status of DACA and TPS, denotes the feeling of “stuckness” in mixed‐status multigenerational families, and foregrounds the profound ways in which place and race intersect with legal, social, and ideological practices of inclusion/exclusion. Underdocumented youth form multiracial coalitions, guided by Black geographies of the region, to challenge imperial borders that criminalise and (re)produce categories of vulnerability. This place in‐between shapes underdocumented youth understanding of the world, informed by, rather than in competition with, Black radical visions of themselves and of the place of the US South. Este artículo académico se basa en observaciones de participantes y series de entrevistas de grupos focales en la parte noreste de Georgia con jóvenes que tienen estatus de DACA o TPS (subdocumentado) para comprender el activismo de esos jóvenes cual asciende de su posicionalidad de estar “atorados en medio”. “Atorados en medio” se refiere a el estatus legal liminal de DACA o TPS y denota los sentimientos de estar “atorados” en familias multigeneracionales con estatus mixto y destaca las maneras profundas en cuales locación y raza se cruzan con prácticas ideológicas, legales y sociales de inclusión y exclusión. Los jóvenes subdocumentados forman coaliciones multirraciales que son guiadas por regiones con geografías Negras, para desafiar fronteras imperiales que criminalizan y (re)producen las categorías de vulnerabilidad. Esta posición de “en medio” da forma a la comprensión de jóvenes subdocumentados de el mundo, cual es informado por, en vez de hacer competencia, con visiones radicales Negras de ellos mismos y en la región Sur de los Estados Unidos.

At the margins of personhood: Rethinking law and life beyond the impasses of biopolitics

Article

Dec 2021

Ayten Gündoğdu

Education and racial capitalism

Article

Nov 2021

This paper works with theories of racial capitalism to show how formal education has been produced through interlocking systems of domination: capitalism, racism, and colonialism. With a focus on the enduring histories of British settler colonialism, we put forward a framework for analysing the constitutive relationship between contemporary systems of education and racial capitalism. The paper discusses three connected relations: (I) the ongoing enclosures and dispossession of land and people, with which the material infrastructures of education are built; (II) the racialised divisions of labour which education systems not only create but are also premised on, and; (III) the extraction of value in and through education, normalising hierarchised life, and steeped in racial capitalism’s defining project of dehumanisation. The paper suggests that sociologies of education need to attend more fully to these relations of racial capitalism if they are to imagine beyond, and mobilise against, education’s role in sustaining white supremacy.

Social Death in the Times of a Pandemic

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2021

On the Struggles and Experiences of Southeast Asian American Academics

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2021

Long T. Bui

The economics of state violence: Explaining mass deportation

Article

Oct 2021

Beth F. Baker

Over the past twenty years, the U.S. government has deported approximately 5 million people, one of the largest forced population movements of modern times. Drawing on ethnographic and quantitative data from Southern California, I describe the devastating economic, social, and emotional impacts of deportation on families, households, and communities. High rates of deportation usually are framed by policymakers as a public good, but the data reported in this study suggest they may have widespread negative repercussions not just for the deported and their loved ones but for the country as a whole, especially in regions with large immigrant populations. In addition, I speculate about why such clearly damaging policies continue to exist despite their economic liabilities and how to understand the policy landscape that maintains them.

Border Struggles, Political Unity, and the Transformative Power of the Local: US Sanctuary Cities and Spain’s Cities of Refuge

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2021

This article draws on theoretical insights about bordering and citizenship as strategies for socially constructing difference and the scholarship on scalar challenges underlying contemporary bordering to analyze sanctuary cities in the United States and cities of refuge in Spain. We argue that these initiatives challenge and resist restrictive national migration policies from below, at the local level, with attention to their implications at the global scale. Such policies have the potential to create meaningful social change by 1) amplifying and producing political unity across socially constructed differences and 2) “scaling down” migration politics from the national to the local level and, simultaneously, “jumping scale” via reliance on human rights framings. We conclude that sanctuary city and city-of-refuge designations are not merely symbolic; instead, these designations can be conceived of as locally based, global repertoires of action that make positive contributions in pursuit of social justice.

Scripting the Conviction: Power and Resistance in the Management of Criminal Stigma

Article

Jul 2021

Melissa Burch

People with criminal records seeking employment face a dilemma: how to discuss their conviction(s) in a job interview. Convicted job seekers are encouraged to draft, revise, and rehearse their “conviction scripts” and to approach their delivery as a Goffmanian performance. Drawing from participant observation within a nonprofit employment program in Southern California, this article analyzes job seekers’ attempts to craft narratives that will satisfy employers’ curiosities and concerns, with the assistance of professional coaches. I find that rather than challenge criminalizing practices or stigma itself, job seekers are encouraged to dissociate from criminal stigma and develop narratives that reinforce dominant frameworks of personal responsibility, remorse, and rehabilitation. They also regularly veer, however, from these conventions, in search of narratives that more accurately explain and contextualize their decisions. I argue that the act of scripting convictions is thus a political process in motion, a negotiation of power, with real life consequences. While at present, conviction scripting tends to reproduce the inequalities that underlie the criminal punishment system, the article concludes by exploring how criminalized people could craft scripts that contribute to their liberation. [stigma, criminalization, race, criminal records, employment] Las personas con registros de antecedentes penales que buscan empleo enfrentan un dilema: cómo discutir sus condena(s) en una entrevista de trabajo. Las personas que buscan empleo habiendo sido condenadas son animadas a redactar borradores, revisar, y practicar sus “textos de condena” y abordar su presentación oral como una presentación teatral Goffmaniana. Basado en observación participativa dentro de un programa de empleo de una organización sin fines de lucro en el sur de California, este artículo analiza los intentos de las personas que buscan empleo para elaborar narrativas que satisfarán las curiosidades y preocupaciones de los empleadores, con la asistencia de entrenadores profesionales. Hallo que en lugar de retar las prácticas que criminalizan o el estigma en sí mismo, las personas que buscan empleo son animadas a disociarse del estigma criminal y desarrollar narrativas que refuerzan los marcos dominantes de responsabilidad personal, arrepentimiento y rehabilitación. Ellos regularmente se desvían, sin embargo, de estas convenciones, en busca de narrativas que con mayor exactitud explican y contextualizan sus decisiones. Argumento que el acto de escribir el texto de las condenas es, por lo tanto, un proceso político en movimiento, una negociación de poder, con consecuencias en la vida real. Aunque en el momento, el escribir los textos de las condenas tiende a reproducir las desigualdades que subyacen en el sistema de castigo penal, el artículo concluye explorando cómo las personas criminalizadas podrían escribir los textos que contribuyen a su liberación. [estigma, criminalización, raza, antecedentes penales, empleo]

Captivity, Kinship, and Black Masculine Care Work under Domestic Warfare

Article

Jul 2021

Orisanmi Burton

This article examines the forms of intergenerational kinship and care work that Black men perform within and beyond US prisons. First, I offer a historical conceptualization of domestic warfare as a multilayered process that targets Black radical activism, social/familial life, and the interiority of Black subjectivity. I argue that the rupturing of intimacy and familial relationships precipitated by the prison should be understood not as an incidental byproduct of a poorly designed carceral regime but as a tactic of war and a condition of genocide. Next, I theorize letter writing as an ethnographic and political modality that is part of a broader repertoire of strategies that Black men deploy to survive within and rebel against domestic war. I then draw on correspondence between myself and Absolute, an imprisoned Black man, as well as oral histories I collected with elders of New York's radical prison movement, to show how Black men care for each other, forge kinship networks, and transmit knowledge. I close by showing how Absolute carries on traditions of knowledge production and care to younger generations of captive Black men and by connecting this intergenerational practice to forms of collective rebellion. [prisons, kinship, Black masculinity, letters, warfare] Este artículo examina las formas de parentesco intergeneracional y el trabajo de cuidar que hombres negros desempeñan dentro y más allá de las prisiones de Estados Unidos. Primero, ofrezco una conceptualización histórica de la guerra doméstica como un proceso de múltiples niveles que va dirigido al activismo radical negro, vida familiar/social y la interioridad de la subjetividad negra. Argumento que la ruptura de la intimidad y de las relaciones familiares precipitadas por la prisión debe ser entendida no como un subproducto incidental de un régimen carcelario mal diseñado sino como una táctica de guerra y una condición de genocidio. Seguidamente, teorizo el escribir cartas como una modalidad etnográfica y política que es parte de un repertorio más amplio de estrategias que los hombres negros utilizan para sobrevivir dentro, y rebelarse en contra de la guerra doméstica. Luego, me baso en la correspondencia entre Absoluto, un hombre negro encarcelado y el autor, así como historias orales recolectadas de los de más edad del movimiento radical de prisiones de Nueva York, para mostrar cómo los hombres negros cuidan el uno del otro, forjan redes de parentesco y transmiten conocimiento. Cierro mostrando cómo Absoluto continúa tradiciones de producción de conocimiento y cuidado por generaciones más jóvenes de hombres negros cautivos, y conectando esta práctica intergeneracional a formas de rebelión colectiva. [prisiones, parentesco, masculinidad negra, cartas, guerra]

The social movement for reproductive justice: Emergence, intersectional strategies, and theory building

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2021

Meghan Daniel

This article reviews the literature on the reproductive justice social movement and provides an overview of its main theorical and empirical foundations and contributions. It begins by tracing the emergence of reproductive justice, grounding it in longstanding histories of resistance and Black feminist theorizing. It highlights intersectionality as a social movement strategy and tactic embraced by reproductive justice activists, and highlights reproductive justice organizing and scholarship that contributes to our theoretical understandings of the racial politics of reproduction and abolition. In so doing, this piece makes two interrelated contributions. First, it argues reproductive justice generates material and theoretical contributions beyond the scope of what is possible for reproductive health and rights frameworks. Second, it demonstrates that bringing reproductive justice into the focus of sociological inquiry is important for advancing social science scholarship.

A Trade Agreement's Impact On Access To Generic Drugs

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2009
HEALTH AFFAIR

Millions of people lack access to affordable medicines. The intellectual property rules in the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) provide pharmaceutical companies with monopoly protections that allow them to market some drugs without competition by less costly generics. We examined availability of certain drugs in Guatemala and found that CAFTA intellectual property rules reduced access to some generic drugs already on the market and delayed new entry of other generics. Some drugs protected from competition in Guatemala will become open for generic competition in the United States before generic versions will be legally available in Guatemala.

Racial realism

Article

Jan 1991
Conn Law Rev

D. A. Bell

Moving up, but How Far? African American Women and Economic Restructuring in Los Angeles, 1970-1990

Article

Oct 2000

In this article we use 1970 to 1990 Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) to examine patterns associated with African American women's economic and labor market integration in Los Angeles. We examine key indicators of overall economic restructuring in Los Angeles, such as patterns of industrial growth and decline during the period in question. We focus primarily on four specific labor market characteristics: changes in industrial characteristics of Los Angeles, changing occupational distribution, changes in earnings, and employment patterns among African American women. Although we focus on trends for African American women, these trends are also examined, where relevant, for other groups. Specifically, comparisons are made with white women and Latinas and with African American, white, and Latino men. Our analysis illustrates the manner in which economic restructuring has had important and contradictory impacts on labor market participation and occupational distribution among African American women.

Racial Politics, Racial Disparities, and the War on Crime

Article

Oct 1994
CRIME DELINQUENCY

Michael Tonry

Racial disparities in the justice system have steadily gotten worse since 1980, primarily because of politically motivated decisions by the Reagan and Bush administrations to promote harsh drug and sanctioning policies that, existing research and broad agreement among practioners concur, could not significantly reduce crime rates or drug use. It is difficult to imagine a persuasive ethical defense of promotion of policies that were unlikely to achieve their ostensible goals but were foreseen to have an adverse disparate effect on Blacks.

American Steroids: Using Race and Gender

Article

Feb 2005
J SPORT SOC ISSUES

Changing Forms of U.S. Hegemony in Puerto Rico: The Impact on the Family and Sexuality

Article

Nov 2001

Helen I. Safa

This article traces three stages in the consolidating process of U.S. hegemony in Puerto Rico since 1898, during which time the island has been subjected to intense Americanization but has managed to maintain a strong national cultural identity. There have been greater transformations in the area of family and sexuality during this period than is generally acknowledged, with a greater emphasis on legal marriage and the nuclear family as opposed to the consensual unions and extended family patterns still prevalent today in the rest of the Hispanic Caribbean. With the support of U.S. social policy, legal marriage was reinforced as a sign of respectability, upward mobility and whiteness, and as a way of Puerto Ricans distancing themselves from the backward Other label imposed by the colonial order. Structural changes such as migration, urbanization and industrialization also promoted transformations in the family, as reduced family size throughout the Caribbean shows. But I would argue that the ideological changes imposed by U.S. hegemony definitely contribute to the dramatic decline in consensual unions in Puerto Rico in comparison to Cuba and the Dominican Republic, where the proportion of such unions continues to rise.

Elvira Arellano: No Rosa ParksCreation of “Us” Versus “Them” in an Opinion Column

Article

Feb 2009
HISPANIC J BEHAV SCI

Sara Mcelmurry

From August 2006 through August 2007, Elvira Arellano, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, lived in a church on Chicago's West Side with her U.S.-born 7-year-old son, Saul, to avoid a deportation order. Her plight played out in Chicago-area and national media, piggybacking on a nationwide debate on immigration. This study focuses on one piece of media coverage of the Arellano controversy: a column written by the Chicago Sun-Times journalist Mary Mitchell, titled “Blacks Know Rosa Parks and You, Arellano, Are No Rosa Parks,” published in August 2006. The controversial column spurred reaction from journalists and readers from other Chicago-area newspapers, mostly notably, Hoy, a Spanish-language daily. This study will illustrate how Arellano is simultaneously positioned as a member of an in-group of “Us” or an out-group of “Them” in the Sun-Times and Hoy and will correlate this Us-Them positioning with differences in the perceived and/or actual audience of each newspaper.

Male Nonemployment in White, Black, Hispanic, and Multiethnic Urban Neighborhoods, 1970-2000

Article

Jan 2008
URBAN AFF REV

Robert L. Wagmiller

Many social problems in urban neighborhoods are rooted in high rates of male nonemployment. Past research suggests that male joblessness is a problem largely in low−income, Black neighborhoods. In contrast, this study reports that increases in male nonemployment over the past 30 years have been more widely distributed across urban neighborhoods. Although rates of male joblessness rose most sharply in low−income Black neighborhoods, more advantaged Black neighborhoods and low−income to moderate−income Hispanic and multiethnic neighborhoods also experienced substantial increases. Multivariate models highlight the important role that changes in the economy played in the growth of male nonemployment in low−income and moderate− income neighborhoods.

Blinded by ‘objectivity’How news conventions caused journalists to miss the real story in the ‘Our Lady’ controversy in Santa Fe

Article

Aug 2005

Kevin Dolan

In 2001, a photo montage by Los Angeles artist Alma López called Our Lady created a firestorm in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Because of journalistic practices that wait for officials or major players to raise issues before doing stories on them in order to claim ‘objectivity’, newspaper coverage left many underlying issues surrounding the controversy largely unexamined. This predominant trend in coverage privileged the almost exclusively male protesters by constantly replaying their attacks. Also, the way in which the different sides were condensed in ongoing stories forced the artist and her mostly female supporters to play defense without their best defense: the Sandra Cisneros essay that inspired the work and its feminist critique of Chicano culture and its effect on Latinas’ self-image.

Racing Religion

Article

Sep 2006

Moustafa Bayoumi

The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew: that is the simple truth from which we must start. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his color? Late in 1942, as the Second World War raged overseas, a Yemeni Muslim immigrant named Ahmed Hassan quietly appeared one day in front of a United States District Court judge. The Michigan resident had come to court for a hearing regarding his petition for naturalization, and while we don't know what he wore that day, it was probably something carefully chosen to downplay his "extremely dark complexion," as described in the judge's decision (In re Hassan 1942, 844). Hassan, after all, was making his ofﬁcial appearance in front of the Court to prove that he was a white person and, therefore, eligible for citizenship. Although Hassan was one of the ﬁrst Arab Muslims to petition for American naturalization, his case was far from unique. Beginning in 1790 (Act 1790) and until 1952 (Immigration 1952), the Naturalization Act had limited citizenship to "free white persons" but without exactly deﬁning what makes a person white. Thus, many people, primarily of Asian descent, had appeared in front of the courts before Hassan to argue that they were "white by law," to borrow a phrase from Ian Haney Lopez's book (1996) of the same name. The immigration laws had changed over the years. In 1870, for example, the Naturalization Act was amended to include "aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent" (Act 1870), and in 1940 (Nationality Act 1940), language was added to include "races indigenous to the Western Hemisphere." Nonetheless, certain Asians, beginning with the Chinese, had been excluded from American citizenship since 1878 (Haney Lopez 1996, 42–45). In 1882, Congress passed the ﬁrst Chinese Exclusion Act, and in 1917, most immigration from Asia was further curtailed with the establishment of what Congress called the "Asiatic Barred Zone" (Chin 1998, 15). The reasoning here was that the country should not admit people who had no chance of naturalization. Despite all these changes, it was still far from clear just what race Hassan was, especially with Yemen sitting squarely on the Arabian Peninsula in Asia. Hassan certainly knew he had a ﬁght ahead of him and was aware that the battle would be about his group membership and not his individual qualiﬁcations. He understood that the Court would want to know if Arabs were white or yellow, European or Asian, Western or Eastern. He probably knew that the Court would wonder if Arabs, as a people, could assimilate into the white Christian culture of the United States or if they were, by nature, unsuited to adapt to the republic where they now lived. After all, in previous "racial-prerequisite cases," as they are called, such political and cultural questions were commonly asked, although they traditionally narrowed in simply on the color of one's skin. Even then, as Haney Lopez tells us, the courts adopted shifting standards of whiteness, ﬁrst using scientiﬁc knowledge (now largely discredited) or congressional intent and then adopting the test of "common understanding" (1996, 67–77). We know that Hassan was aware of the impending questions and the legal history of immigration by the fact that he came to Court that day armed with afﬁdavits stating that his coloring "is typical of the majority of the Arabians from the region from which he comes, which [in] fact is attributed to the intense heat and the blazing sun of that area" (In re Hassan 1942, 844). Under his arm were other afﬁdavits, claims by unnamed ethnologists declaring that "the Arabs are remote descendants of and therefore members of the Caucasian or white race, and that [Hassan] is therefore eligible for citizenship" (846). He had done his homework. He had hope. Whatever optimism he may have had, however, was soon dashed. Hassan's petition was denied. In his three-page decision dated December 14, 1942, Judge Arthur J. Tuttle straightforwardly stated that "Arabs are not white persons within the meaning of the [Nationality] Act" (In re Hassan 1942, 847). Interestingly, Tuttle...

The Battle of Los Angeles: The Cultural Politics of Chicana/o Music in the Greater Eastside

Article

Sep 2004
Am Q

Victor Hugo Viesca

East Los Angeles is the center of a flourishing musical cultural scene with a renewed "Chicana/o" sensibility. This scene is being led by a collective of socially conscious and politically active Latin-fusion bands that emerged in the 1990s, including Aztlán Underground, Blues Experiment, Lysa Flores, Ozomatli, Ollin, Quetzal, Quinto Sol, Slowrider, and Yeska. Along with visual artists, activists, and audiences, the musicians of the Eastside scene comprise an emergent cultural movement that is grounded in the new spatial and social relations generated in Los Angeles in the transnational era. The East L.A. scene's history of formation, the multiplicity of its sounds, and its commitment to political activism and coalition building all illuminate the relations between culture and politics at the present moment. The musical practices of the East L.A. scene echo the dislocations and displacements endemic to global cities in the transnational era, but they also reflect the emergence of new forms of resistance that find counter-hegemonic possibilities within contradictions. In culture and in politics, groups in the Eastside scene proceed through immanent critiques and creative reworkings of already existing social relations, rather than through transcendant teleologies aimed at the establishment of utopian sites and subjects. Rather than a politics of "either/or" that asks people to choose between culture and politics, between class and race, or between distinct national identities, this cultural movement embraces a politics of "both/and" that encourages dynamic, fluid, and flexible stances and identity categories.

The “Practice of Humanity”

Article

Sep 2010
Fem Media Stud

“Practice of Humanity” examines visual and legal representations of transnational sex and domestic work. Specifically, we analyze a 2003 United Nations public service announcement, Cleaning Lady; the 2000 UN Protocol on Human Trafficking; the 2000 US Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act; and current trends in the sociological literatures of both types of work. We demonstrate how these texts allow particular connections between domestic and sex workers, while foreclosing others. We draw out the ways these regimes suppress understandings of work in favor of moralizing about workers; how the “domestic” in domestic work, and “work” in sex work continue to vex humanitarian operations; and the ways national and racial privilege cut across connections between domestic and sex work.

Distinguishing between deservingness and entitlement: Earned outcomes versus lawful outcomes

Article

May 2003
EUR J SOC PSYCHOL

N. T. Feather

Two studies are described that investigated a proposed distinction between deservingness and entitlement. Deservingness was assumed to relate to the evaluative structure of actions and their contingent outcomes and entitlement to an external framework involving rights, rules and social norms. Study 1 investigated reactions to scenarios in which a student running for election in a national student organization exerted either high or low effort, was either eligible or ineligible for election by virtue of age, and was either elected or not elected. Study 2 investigated reactions to a scenario in which a stimulus person suffering from an illness had to decide how much money to leave in a will to a son, nephew, or friend who provided him with either help or limited help. In both studies, student participants (n = 134 in Study 1, n = 236 in Study 2) completed ratings of deservingness and entitlement, as well as other measures. Results of both studies supported the distinction between deservingness and entitlement. Whether an outcome was deserved depended on amount of effort in Study 1 and on amount of help in Study 2. Results are also reported for other justice variables and for reported affect in Study 1, and for the amount allocated in the will in Study 2. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Blurring the Boundaries Between Immigration and Crime Control After September 11th

Article

Jan 2005
Boston Coll Third World Law J

Teresa A. Miller

Although the escalating criminalization of immigration law has been examined at length, the social control dimension of this phenomenon has gone relatively understudied. This Article attempts to remedy this deficiency by tracing the relationship between criminal punishment and immigration law, demonstrating that the War on Terror has further blurred these distinctions and exposing the social control function that pervades immigration law enforcement after September 11th prioritized counterterrorism. In doing so, the author draws upon the work of Daniel Kanstroom, Michael Welch, Jonathan Simon and Malcolm Feeley.

Collateral damage: Southeast Asian poverty in the United States

Article

Mar 2000
Soc Text

Eric Tang

Social Text 18.1 (2000) 55-79 On 22 August 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). Once fully implemented, this act has the potential to destroy the means of subsistence of millions of working and jobless poor who will be removed from all federal assistance programs granted under the Social Security Act by the year 2002. Yet the damaging effects of PRWORA have already been felt. Those who were targeted to suffer the most immediate and life-threatening cuts to the welfare state were "legal," green-card-holding immigrants receiving federal aid through the Social Security Administration (SSA). In September 1997, states began implementing their specific plans to remove immigrants from SSA-administered Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the disabled and elderly, and food stamps for dependent, immigrant children. Following this initial immigrant removal, federal cash assistance programs, namely Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), will be drastically reduced and eventually eliminated for both citizens and immigrants within five years of the signing of PRWORA. Southeast Asians in the United States -- primarily Vietnamese, Lao, Hmong, and Cambodian immigrants -- represent the largest per capita race or ethnic group in the country receiving public assistance. Originally placed on federal welfare rolls as a temporary and "adaptive" measure under the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975, a large segment of Southeast Asian refugees who fled their homelands in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and the subsequent bombing of Cambodia by the United States are now entering a third consecutive decade of welfare dependency, contrary to government officials' predictions of a seamless transition into American labor markets. Stripped of their refugee status in the post-Cold War era, virtually all Southeast Asians have now been reclassified as permanent residents (or "legal" immigrants) and are therefore fully subject to the impending cuts under PRWORA. The consequences of the new law's "immigrant removal" campaign are sweeping and disastrous for Southeast Asian communities that, in California alone, have shown poverty and welfare-dependency rates of nearly 80 percent for the state's entire Southeast Asian population. For many of its critics, PRWORA represents a post-civil rights, neoconservative backlash against the poor and nonwhite sectors of the United States, particularly against the black urban poor who have been labeled the new "underclass"--a damaging term that encompasses a range of racist imagery including the sexually deviant "welfare queen," the "dysfunctional" black family, and the uncontrollably violent black male. These distorted and dehumanizing constructions are reproduced in mainstream periodicals, popular literature, and even liberal-leaning policy reports. Yet, despite its wide circulation, the term underclass evades a precise and agreed-on definition. According to historian Robin Kelley, this lack of precision stems from the fact that underclass has never actually referred to a class of people but rather to a set of behaviors. "What makes the 'underclass' a class," suggests Kelley, "is members' common behavior -- not their income, their poverty level, or the kind of work they do. . . . It's a definition of class driven more by social panic than by systemic analysis." The common behaviors that comprise the underclass are wide ranging and arbitrary; they can include criminal mischief, sexual promiscuity, shiftlessness, dependency, nihilism, immorality, and deviance. In an attempt to offer some coherence to these random sets of behaviors, underclass proponents have conveniently drawn on the term culture. Indeed, underclass behaviors are often grouped together to represent a so-called culture of poverty. Here, the new underclass literature is appropriating and distorting the work of Oscar Lewis, who, in the early 1960s, first introduced the phrase subculture of poverty. Lewis, however, did not evoke culture to describe a set of immutable behaviors, but rather to describe the daily practices that poor people engaged in, in an effort to both survive and resist systemic inequality and class polarization. For contemporary culture of poverty theorists, the addition of culture still fails to yield a more precise definition of the term. However, its evocation is nonetheless powerful, for it designates an ethnographic field, an "area of difference" wherein the aforementioned behaviors are confined to a particular group -- the black urban poor...

Queer Loving

Article

Jun 2005
GLQ-J LESBIAN GAY ST

Siobhan B. Somerville

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.3 (2005) 335-370 In the past decade, popular and juridical debates about lesbian and gay civil rights in the United States have been driven primarily by a liberal discourse of inclusion, framed by the assumption that lesbians and gay men constitute one of the last groups of excluded "minorities" to be denied full citizenship under the law. Such a view tends to rely on an optimistic reading of the history of civil rights in the twentieth-century United States, a reading that moves gradually from discrimination against minority groups toward the fulfillment of an idealized democracy, in which all individuals have equal opportunities to inhabit the roles, rights, and responsibilities of citizens. This narrative of progress also creates and maintains comparisons among different historically excluded groups, such that the rights gained by one group establish a precedent for another group's entitlement to the same rights. Although many critics have argued that identity categories are intersecting, not parallel, categories of analysis, our knowledge still tends to be organized through analogies naturalized in the context of identity politics, including the notion that sexual identity is in most ways, or at least in the most salient ways, like race. One version of this analogy, sometimes referred to as the "miscegenation analogy," has become increasingly visible in recent public debates about same-sex marriage. In a December 14, 2003, opinion piece for the New York Times, for instance, David E. Rosenbaum states that "as a political, legal and social issue, same-sex marriage seems to be now where interracial marriage was about 50 years ago." Likewise, Gail Mathabane asserts in USA Today that "interracial couples were [once] in the same boat that same-sex couples are in today. They were vilified, persecuted and forbidden to marry. Interracial marriage was considered a felony punishable by five years in a state penitentiary." Naturalizing a progressive teleology of rights, Mathabane continues, "Like interracial marriages, same-sex marriages are bound to become legal sooner or later, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state same-sex sodomy laws [in Lawrence v. Texas (2003)]." In legal argumentation the analogy between same-sex and interracial couples has played a significant role for as long as the constitutional right to same-sex marriage has been argued before the courts. From Baker v. Nelson (1971), the first case in which same-sex marriage was presented (unsuccessfully) to a U.S. state court, to more recent challenges to state marriage regulations, advocates have argued that the strongest precedent for a constitutional right to same-sex marriage can be found in earlier decisions on interracial marriage. The two cases most consistently invoked are Loving v. Virginia (1967), the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriage, and, to a lesser extent, Perez v. Sharp (1948), in which the California Supreme Court became the first state court to rule that antimiscegenation statutes violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The miscegenation analogy seems to have widespread appeal, but whatever its rhetorical power, it has obscured the complicated ways in which race and sexual orientation have been intertwined in U.S. law. Too often the history of interracial heterosexuality in the United States is narrated as if it had nothing to do with the history of homosexuality—except as a precedent. In fact, the current use of the miscegenation analogy enacts a kind of amnesia about how U.S. legal discourse historically has produced narratives of homosexuality in relation to race. This amnesia results in part from the methods by which precedent is produced by lawyers and judges, who, as active interpreters of the law, often creatively and oppositionally isolate fragments of past decisions to support their present cases. While precedent is usually understood, at its best, as a process of creative remembering, it is also a powerful form of forgetting. Establishing precedent involves extracting a legal principle from its historical contexts and recontextualizing it, shorn of the particularizing details of any single case, in the present. As a method of judicial reasoning, the production of precedent is often an enabling...

Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected

Abstract

No full-text available

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