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Care is a practice and form of labour making human survival and flourishing possible. This Symposium explores the place and work of care within housing movements, asking how care operates as a politics, an ethics, and a set of practices through which tenants survive—and ultimately seek to transform—the structural violence of capitalist housing systems. Situated in US cities with abiding associations with Blackness and indigeneity, papers in the Symposium examine housing movements that take care as the starting point. As we discuss in this introduction to the Symposium, in such movements, care operates as connective tissue across households and modes of difference; challenges relations of racial capitalism and settler colonialism that underlie dominant understandings of who deserves and can demand care; and drives calls for public care and experiments with non-propertised forms of ownership. Housing systems are care infrastructures, making housing movements a vital place for care work.

Abstract: This paper unfolds in three parts. In Part 1, I describe how I have contended with the fraught relationships among mapping, nationalism, and colonialism in my teaching and research. When writing my first book, Contesting Race and Citizenship, I had to reckon with the positivist impulse to enumerate and map Black Italianness—and, more broadly, with the politics of visibility at a time of increasingly virulent racial nationalisms, xenophobia, and outright anti‐Black violence. In Part 2, I describe the ways my own thinking about mapping has been pushed in new directions by insights from Black geographies. Drawing on Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, and Édouard Glissant—as well as essays from the edited volume The Black Geographic—I argue that Black geographic counter‐cartographies foreground insurgent Black spatial knowledges and practices that have always exceeded racial‐spatial violence, and approach mapping as both a material and poetic process. In Part 3, I conclude by advancing some tentative ideas about what it might mean to map new or alternative geographies of abolitionist struggle that attend to the interconnections between Black Atlantic and Black Mediterranean histories of racial capitalism.

A wide range of digital innovations has changed property relations globally over the past fifteen years. What are we to make of these digital experiments with landed property? I argue we should not mistake their technological novelty for a break with the geographic and historical specificities of property relations. The yoking of property to modernity and civilization makes technological progress a fundamental part of how relationships to land are constituted and reconstituted, and in whose interests, throughout global capitalism. In this article, I situate 21st century housing market technologies within sedimented relations of landed property in the United States, showing the history of property innovation in the United States is also one of racialized wealth accumulation and dispossession. I interpret current anxieties about ‘robot landlords’ as anxieties about how the shifting landscape of property ownership appears to threaten the economic benefits associated with racial dominance.

As Covid-19 spread quickly, New York City (NYC) designated food delivery as essential and stopped policing the electric bikes ridden by 'threatening' delivery workers. We use racial capitalism to examine how becoming essential reconfigured the labor mobilities of NYC food delivery workers to maintain and create accumulations of racial capitalism in a crisis of pandemic-induced (im)mobilities. This research draws from pre-pandemic and during-pandemic data collections including analyses of governmental documents, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and public data to understand the value extracted from the essential designation of food delivery. Pre-pandemic labor conditions extracted value from food delivery mobility by offloading risks and costs through informal working conditions and policing. Designating food delivery as essential produced new arrangements of uneven (im)mobilities that built upon preexisting conditions of delivery mobility that extracted novel values by intensifying, altering, and creating sacrificial hazards and burdens for workers. However, the embodied incongruencies and fissures of being essential conversely fueled organizing by delivery workers to use their essential narrative to secure local labor victories. The fissures of the essential designation in food delivery indicate critical junctures between racial capitalism and (im)mobilities for possible future accumulations and interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An outpouring of critical sub/urban scholarship in recent years has explored the historical and ongoing linkages between race, real estate, and space in the United States. Much of this literature has positioned residential segregation as crucial for structuring the geographies of capital accumulation, highlighting how segregation delimits places for extraction and dispossession. In this essay, I build from the foundations this literature lays by bringing together Charles Abrams' concept of "the racist theory of value" (RTV) and David Harvey's notion of "anti-value" to illuminate the centrality of racialized devaluation in the accumulation process in the US. Specifically, I contend that the RTV, in its role in entrenching residential segregation and collapsing race and value together in space, has helped to demarcate and contain the devaluation that capitalism requires in Black residential spaces. As a key innovation for real estate capital to manage the geographies of (anti-)value, the RTV ensures that the economic losses generated in the accumulation process are felt most acutely in Black communities. In this way, the RTV constitutes a form of planned spatial obsolescence wherein the restricted movement of Black people is converted into the controlled movement of devaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first spatial analysis of racial disparities in the UK welfare sanction regime. As part of their austerity programme, the UK government tightened the conditionality of welfare programmes and intensified the use of financial penalties against welfare claimants who failed to demonstrate compliance with these conditions. Analysing Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) data from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Office for National Statistics between 2012 and 2019 we draw attention to the spatially uneven and highly racialised geography of welfare sanctions in England. Claimants from racially minoritised backgrounds are consistently more likely to be referred for a sanction by Jobcentre caseworkers and receive an adverse decision at the hands of institutional decision‐makers. Within this, however, there are important scalar and spatial differences that warrant critical attention. In rural England, the risk of being sanctioned is substantially higher for all groups, but especially for Mixed heritage and Black/Black British claimants who in some areas are over twice as likely to be sanctioned as their White counterparts. Since ethnicity data have not been published for Universal Credit sanction decisions, the presented evidence offers critical insight into the potential persistence of racial injustice in applying welfare sanctions. We identify 'hotspots' of racism in the sanction regime, most of which are in rural areas, before offering three interpretative frameworks through which spatial and racial disparities might be explained. Any suggestion that such disparities simply derive from the behaviour of DWP staff fails to adequately account for deeply entrenched histories of welfare racism, rural racism and the role of welfare sanctioning in dynamics of racial capitalism: that is, disciplining and impoverishing racialised populations in ways that generate conditions for capital accumulation. By contributing new empirical and theoretical insights to the often neglected study of rural austerity and welfare, the paper calls for scholarship to investigate the variegations of welfare, austerity and racial capitalism in diverse rural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role that data-driven technologies play in expanding and reasserting the legitimacy of the US racial state during times of crisis. Specifically, I examine how prison officials used a software called Verus to reinforce the perceived necessity of penal institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Government officials used Verus to produce narratives that (1) recast criminalized communities as dangerous and therefore disposable and (2) shielded carceral institutions from liability for systematic neglect. Ultimately, the aim of this article is to contribute to emerging critical concepts such as "data colonialism," a term that has largely been used to describe the social and economic consequences of parasitic data extraction and monopoly control of digital infrastructure. In addition to these issues, I argue that data-driven technologies are used as vehicles for movement capture and the reproduction of prison logics that enable modes of racialized economic exploitation that extend far beyond the high-tech innovation economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research emphasizes the precarity of workers engaged in the exchange of goods and services through digital platforms. Yet few studies have systematically examined how racial discrimination shapes the opportunities of platform workers. Here, we focus on influencers, or people who monetize content on social media platforms. Drawing on a mixed-method analysis of 1,082 posts crowdsourced by the @InfluencerPayGap Instagram account, we document three findings. First, while most influencers in our sample received monetary payment for sponsored campaigns, rates are significantly lower than expected based on industry estimates. Second, social media metrics are racialized to justify paying influencers of color less than white influencers. Third, influencers of color are less likely than white influencers to receive monetary compensation or succeed in their negotiations with brands. Contrary to the rhetoric of fairness and democratization promoted by digital platforms, these dynamics reproduce racial domination and undermine collective action among social media influencers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of apartheid, life in South Africa has been marked by an epidemic of death among the youth—people between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. First as a result of HIV/AIDS and political violence, and more recently as a result of "these diseases," a broad group of illnesses that affect the youth, homicide and suicide, this epidemic is in part a consequence of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in South Africa. This epidemic of death can also be understood as an example of necropolitics—the failure of the postapartheid state. At the same time, as the stories in this article reveal, no one or two analytical approach(es) can fully make sense of what it means to live in a place where the youth are dying at such a high rate. Drawing inspiration from work in Black studies, and Black feminisms more specifically, and driven by the stories of those living through loss in South Africa, this article sketches what it means to live in a place where youth is defined by death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chicago's broader notorious reputation of gang and gun violence dominates popular discursive conversations about the city's safety and stability. Through a critical structural perspective, this article explores the constitutive historical continuity and spatialized contours of racial capitalism in the facilitation of structured violence and organized death in city neighborhoods. These dynamics are most relevant where individualized and pathological narratives of interpersonal gang-based gun violence are rampant. The focus is on the context of Mexican Chicago, particularly the transnational site of Little Village. Using hyper-local examples on the environment, education, and labor-based economic markets, I showcase how this diasporic Mexican community is an instructive site highlighting the ongoing presence of colonially constituted structures of expropriation, dispossession, exploitation, and displacement endemic to the United States empire and its resultant violence. I suggest that gang-based gun violence is tied to broader death-making machinery, leading us to robust alternative conceptual frames and reactions when socio-politically engineered 'crime' and violence take place across urban city neighborhood spaces. I conclude with a paired abolitionist perspective and implications for critical sociology and the study of gangs specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay serves as an urgent cause for action and open call to envision the abolition of U.S. law schools. Traditional legal education's current manifestation, I argue, serves as a unique system of socialization that advances harm in service of the USA as a settler nation-state. Through a historically grounded analysis of the law school as a project of exclusionary power, this essay identifies traditional U.S. legal education's (1) pedagogical harm, in the imperial curriculum and instruction of law students; (2) structural harm, in the gatekeeping of legal knowledge; and (3) ideological harm, in the training of future lawyers as agents of settler-state power. Drawing from movements of scholarship-activism in critical legal pedagogy, rhetorical studies, and abolition, this essay proposes radical reforms to the law school as footholds toward freedom. In situating the law school as a critical zone of abolitionist struggle, this essay makes the case that rhetoricians, legal scholars, and advocates aligned with the work of liberation might join across disciplines, jurisdictions, and time to advance "non-reformist reforms" to traditional U.S. legal education. Only through conscious processes of reimagination, I insist, can we more forcefully contribute to the abolition of oppressive formations of power everywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the origins and goals of the abolition movement in the United States that began during the era of chattel slavery to demonstrate that the true aspirations of this movement—a racially just society free of racism and oppression—remain aspirations that are not yet realized. Realizing these aspirations is the real work of abolition and this is the work that social work must embrace today. Yet for social work to truly work toward an anti-racist future, we must also be anti-capitalist. This requires that we work toward both the abolition of harmful, racist systems and abolition of the racial capitalism that maintains these systems. The article concludes with recommendations for scholars and leaders in human service organizations to engage in and advance this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community schools are schools which recognize that children are apart of communities, and therefore, attempt to directly address the outside of school factors that impact student learning by offering services to students, their families, and the broader community through a variety of partnerships with governmental and community-based organizations. Based on empirical research, this paper argues that while the community schools provide a much-needed approach to educating students beyond their academic needs, the schools work within deeply-rooted racist systems and structures. Seen through the lens of racial capitalism, in particular, the work of community schools may be quite limited in what they can accomplish. Using census data from the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) combined with GIS mapping, this paper investigated the racially segregated contexts in which community schools operated in Baltimore. In so doing, the paper argues that the potential of community schools is circumscribed by the spatial injustice that the neighborhoods experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses data at the intersection of digital geographies, critical data studies, and Black studies to bring clarity to relations, differences, and frictions between Black knowledge‐making and common data practices. I highlight artist Tonika Lewis Johnson's project, Inequity for Sale, and detail a genealogy of the data she uses in this project to illustrate how she situates these data within the afterlives of slavery. Drawing from Avery Gordon's theorisation of haunting and ideas towards absences and erasures in Black archival practice, I argue that absences in data can lead to narratives that focus on violence as a singular historical event that is isolated from a larger history of violence. I suggest that bringing a curiosity to these absences, rather than dismissing them or framing them as oversights, can help re‐situate data within a broader temporal‐relational context that brings a sense of Black humanity to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper problematizes how scholars understand the relation between resilience and justice. Critical and applied scholarship tends to dismiss resilience as a neoliberal barrier to justice, or assume it necessarily advances justice outcomes. Instead, drawing on collaborative fieldwork with Miami-based social and climate justice organizers, we explore how resilience is mobilized in contextually-specific struggles against racialized vulnerability and insecurity. Reading across literatures in political geography, cultural geography, and Black geographies, we highlight absurd and inconsistent expressions of resilience in our collaborators' justice advocacy work. A focus on the absurd directs attention to the way diverse practices of resilience emerge from 'spaces out of joint,' where modernity's universalizing promises of betterment run aground against long histories of racial violence that secure White futurity. Our community collaborators ironically mobilize and reject resilience in strategic ways that reflect their struggles to create and defend place against the racialized extraction of value, disinvestment, and displacement. This creates a variegated geography of resilience and justice that is irreducible to predetermined critical or applied analytical frameworks. Instead, we emphasize the need to embrace the absurd destabilization of conventional analytical categories, in order to open space for new problems and responses for collaborative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

iBuyers are firms that use automated valuation models (AVMs), streamline home buying processes, and provide all-cash offers to purchase homes. Although the previous literature has explored the roles and limitations of iBuyers in the housing market, empirical research on the racial implications of these algorithmic home buying processes remains understudied. Using a spatial lag model, this study shows the spatial clustering of iBuyer profit margins, that iBuyers gain more profits when they resell to individuals than institutions, and that some iBuyers have a statistically significant correlation between their profit margins and the proportion of marginalized racial groups within a census tract, while controlling for individual housing characteristics, neighborhood housing quality and demand, and neighborhood amenities and socioeconomic factors. These findings suggest that the more adeptly iBuyers can forecast housing values, the greater the potential to maximize profits from homeowners in communities of color. Consequently, this research contributes to the understanding of how technological mechanisms operate within a purportedly race-neutral framework and advocates for the development and deployment of algorithmic systems guided by the principles of antisubordination, rather than relying solely on notions of “fairness” and anticlassification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn this response to the book symposium on What is Antiracism?, the author assesses some of the changed circumstances since publication in the summer of 2023, before seeking to clarify the book’s arguments about the roots of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racisms in neoliberal racial capitalism. The method of focusing on neoliberal ideas as part of a broader account of the political economy of racialization is defended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores parent-teacher partnerships as a strategy for improving students’ educational experiences and addressing racial equity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a subset of qualitative open-response questions specific to family perceptions from a large-scale 2020 Boston Public Schools survey, the results of this study indicate that the demands of remote learning during the pandemic left families, particularly those of Black and Latinx backgrounds, desiring stronger relational connections with teachers and schools. This analysis furthers the literature on race and education by attending to how white racial domination influences educational opportunity, even in times of crisis. Accordingly, our findings emphasize how the wider society must reckon with the effects of racial capitalism as a driving force of racialized inequities in student and family experiences in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I illustrate the interplay between infrastructure and racialised differentiation through the case of the Maya Train—a contentious megaproject aimed at constructing 1,554 km of rail tracks across southeast Mexico, led by the López Obrador federal administration. Drawing on an analysis of narratives produced by the state, I argue that the Maya Train sustains and reproduces racial capitalism. The argument is developed by putting Gargi Bhattacharyya's and Nancy Fraser's understanding of the racial capitalism framework in conversation with Mónica Moreno Figueroa's conceptualisation of mestizaje. I show how the Maya Train functions as a project of mestizaje by promising homage, social justice, and development while also acting as a homogenising and oppressive force. The racialising practices embedded in the megaproject reproduce and extend colonial legacies in a heartland of expropriation and are transformed into materiality through the power of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the complex dynamics of reproductive labor beyond traditional domestic spaces. Topics include Matthiesen's exploration of how increasing inequality; the impact of violent systems, such as mass incarceration and for-profit healthcare, on the forms of reproductive exploitation that arise outside the home; and the role of lesbian and queer family-making as a significant exception within this history,.

Apartheid has become an increasingly important framework for understanding and challenging Israeli rule in Palestine. The Apartheid Convention states apartheid is a crime against humanity. We contend what is missing from this definition of apartheid is an economic and ontological link. Although the current legal definition focuses solely on the political regime, it does not provide a strong basis for critiquing the economic aspects of a settler colonial state embedded in apartheid. To address this concern, we propose a more comprehensive definition of apartheid which grew out of the struggle in South Africa during the 1970s that gained support among revolutionaries due to the limits of decolonisation in South Africa after 1994 — highlighting the reality(ies) that apartheid is intimately connected to capitalism. This conceptualisation was termed racial capitalism. This article argues that racial capitalism provides a more thorough understanding of the destructive dynamics of the Israeli settler colonial project, one that insists that the struggle against Israeli domination must confront both the apartheid state and the racial capitalist system if Palestinians ever hope to achieve liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as a starting point the desire of many to locate the unfolding genocide in Gaza in the irrationality of its perpetrators — the Israeli state and/or its imperial backers — this article proposes instead to understand it as an extreme expression of the continuous violence necessary to maintain not only local settler colonial rule, but the global capitalist system as a whole. Building on the existing literature on settler colonialism and racial capitalism, and insisting on the ways that both should be understood not as discrete, self-contained objects of study, but as co-constitutive elements of the global order, this article attempts to illuminate the structural logics at play in Israel's latest and most brutal assault on Palestinian life. In doing so, the article emphasises Zionism's role in maintaining western imperialism at a crucial nodal point of the world economy and, in turn, the latter's commitment to guaranteeing its stability and dominance. The article resists, however, the urge to move from explaining current structures of domination to declaring them as final or unshakable. It therefore ends by proposing possible different tomorrows, through an engagement with the Palestinian revolutionary tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates racial capitalism as a historical-theoretical framework to generate new and alternative theory on the question of Palestine. It argues that the genocidal assault on Gaza must be understood as the clearest expression of the logic of racial capitalism and the terrain upon which we must generate theory and strategy able to dismantle Zionism, colonialism and Imperialism. Many of the critiques of Zionism deploy frameworks of apartheid, understood by radicals in South Africa as a social structure reproduced by racial capitalism. It was understood that such a system could only be effectively dismantled through a national liberation project which understood race, class, capital and Imperialism as a single contradiction which must be overthrown as a totality. Similarly, earlier theorists within the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, such as Fayez Sayegh, understood Zionist settler colonialism as an outpost of Western Imperialism. By tracing the emergence of racial capitalism within the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the similarities between the white minority regime and Zionism, this article acts as a point of departure to drawing together histories of the Black radical tradition and the Palestinian struggle in crafting radical theory relevant for our present moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains entrepreneurial activity patterns in the United Kingdom labour market using theories of racial capitalism and intersectional feminism. Using UK Office for National Statistics Labour Force Survey data 2018–2019 and employing probit modelling techniques on employment modes, self-employment types and work arrangements among differing groups, we investigate inequality in self-employment within and between socio-structural groupings of race, class and gender. We find that those belonging to non-dominant gender, race and socio-economic class groupings experience an intersecting set of entrepreneurial penalties, enhancing understanding of the ways multiple social hierarchies interact in self-employment patterns. This robust quantitative evidence challenges contemporary debates, policy and practice regarding the potential for entrepreneurship to offer viable income generation opportunities by those on the socio-economic margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In racial capitalism, employers increase their profit by recruiting “cheap labor,” who are typically racialized minorities. States and employers govern these workers by carceral means, variously confining them, extracting their labor, and ensuring that they remain docile enough not to protest and demand better wages and rights. But how are workers—who draw high wages yet experience labor devaluation or “cheapening”—governed? Based on interviews and participant observation, I study Indian immigrant tech workers in the United States. To distinguish their class position, I characterize them as “high‐income cheap labor” and contend that these workers are governed by “covert carcerality”—where the material privilege of high income and documented migration make their labor devaluation by carceral means insidious. I identify three mechanisms of covert carcerality—neutral enclosures, informalization, and restricted family formation. The covert carcerality of high‐income cheap labor reveals the class‐based variations of carceral labor governance in neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn this paper, I analyse the intersection of settler colonialism, racial capitalism and border violence by examining Cabecitas Blancas a project run by the Yucatecan government to reunite families divided by the US-Mexican border. A unique program in Mexico, Cabecitas Blancas helps elders who have not seen their children living in the United States for at least 10 years, due to their children’s precarious immigration status, reunite for a short period of time. I have developed the term tramitología to show the way the settler colonial state monitors and restrict Indigenous mobility by designating who is “worthy” of government support. I demonstrate how the flow of mostly Maya elders via Cabecitas Blancas between borders is facilitated only because they become state commodities that sustain racial capitalism via tourism and multicultural policies. Ultimately, I argue that reform programs such as Cabecitas Blancas enable and (re)produce exploitation, settler colonialism and border violence. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with government officials as well as YouTube videos and online news articles depicting different stages of the program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic paper explores attitudes and perceptions of Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI) regarding Palestinians from the West Bank (PWB). It focuses on the semantic complex of ḍaffāwi ('who comes from the West Bank'), which entails a combination of cultural superiority, distrust, romanticizing, and ambivalence. Treating the ḍaffāwi as a speech act and reading it as a cultural text that is rooted in PCI's collective political unconscious, we argue that their mixed attitudes of superiority and idealization with regard to WBP, and by implication their self-Orientalism, reflect a deep sense of deadlock that characterizes their identity work, as indigenous citizens of an ethnocratic state that has been colonizing their people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since South Africa's 1994 transition from apartheid to democracy, the African National Congress (ANC) has advanced place renaming alongside jurisdictional rescaling. This confluence allows scholars to examine the political-economic, symbolic, and mnemonic dimensions of territorial inscription. The ANC's wall-to-wall system of local and district municipalities aimed to rectify the inequality-exacerbating geography of apartheid and create more robust and redistributive localities. Concomitantly, jurisdictional toponyms celebrate anti-apartheid struggle heroes and cut across prior fault-lines of white and Black, haves and have-nots. Based on fieldwork in the Mahikeng Local Municipality (formerly two cities, Mmabatho and Mafikeng, in the Bophuthatswana 'Bantustan'), I find that new local-government and district-level jurisdictions can indeed integrate prior fault-lines. Yet the process of subnational restructuring also created new inequalities, for instance across municipal categories and between traditional and municipal councils. Residents' perceptions of local changes are differentiated: some employ new place and jurisdictional names and find State efforts admirable; others see State efforts as merely symbolic changes justifying corruption, opacity, and state-capture; and still others applaud State efforts but see limited results, blaming broader world systems of racial-capitalist urbanization. This research reveals how place-naming and jurisdictional reformulation are worthwhile steps towards rectifying apartheid-era inequalities, but require grassroots popular-democratic decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I articulate the value of understanding antiracism from a materialist perspective, drawing from the concept of racial capitalism. I critique the lack of accounting for race in class-first paradigms of critical scholarship in music education, arguing that racial hierarchy laid the foundation for capitalist exploitation through colonialism. Employing critical race theory, I discuss the racial nature of class formation in the United States, focusing on the connection between housing, school funding, and so-called high-performing music programs. I then discuss the limitations of current anti-racist scholarship in music education, suggesting that its focus on representation and classroom practice neglects the material conditions that shape music teaching. Drawing from Olúfémi Táíwò's work, I propose a constructive approach to reparations in music education that attends to the material and symbolic aspects of white supremacy inside and outside of the music classroom. By taking a both/and approach to antiracism, music education could contribute to the self-determination of racially oppressed people and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial technologies or 'fintech'—an array of digital technologies ranging from mobile banking and digital payment systems to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies—are heralded for solving problems of access to financial products and services and improving people's participation in the economy. However, we contend that fintech is an invasive infrastructure by learning from Indigenous theorizing of oil and gas pipelines alongside concepts of predatory inclusion and obfuscation. We use critical discourse analysis to study finance, technology and social media companies' language over nearly three decades of newswires and press releases that promote new retail financial products and services. We develop themes of new products old promises , benevolent exploitation , efficient obfuscation and information extraction. Similar to oil and gas pipelines within the project of settler colonialism, our findings show how fintech operates as invasive infrastructure by serving as a key link for connecting oppressed and marginalized peoples to companies for predation and extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cedric Robinson's increasingly popular and influential work Black Marxism is best understood as a project of post-Marxist critique. Robinson's book, now regarded as a classic, asks a series of important questions of Marxism, but each of its major arguments marks a fundamental departure from the theoretical perspectives of both European and Black Marxists. The book exists in a historical moment of crisis for the left and intellectual retreat from Marxism; Robinson's relationship with Marxism and his place in the political tradition to which he gave a name, the Black Radical Tradition, suggests three main arguments. First, Robinson's critiques of the classical Marxist tradition — focused on its apparent economism and Eurocentrism — are based on a flattening of this tradition and a marked break from Marxist methodology. Second, Robinson's critique does not neatly align with the perspectives of the radical Black intellectuals whom he discusses, and indeed his conclusions are frequently in conflict with them. Third, the emancipatory project of Black Studies and the research programs convened under Robinson's influence will be best served by cautious and critical engagements with Robinson's seminal work. The generative questions that Robinson asks will be better answered through a materialist account of Black history, a syncretic understanding of Black culture, and a nonreductive, revolutionary Marxism providing the guide for political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to examine Du Bois' positive engagement with the Marxist dialectical categories that are the corner-stone of the politico-philosophical tradition, as in Berteli Oilman's Dance of The Dialectic and Fredrich Engels' Anti-Duhring. Du Bois' relationship to Marxism remains downplayed and understudied due to anti-communist historiography and postmodernist interpretations. W. E. B. Du Bois' 1939 work Black Folk, Then and Now demonstrates the centrality of Marxist dialectics to his work, clarifying his philosophical and historiographical development after completing Black Reconstruction. This abstract and philosophical reading of Black Folk, Then and Now reveals not merely that the late Du Bois' radicalism can be categorized as Marxian but also that his late works cannot be understood without an understanding of Marxist political economy and philosophy, revealing that Black Folk, Then and Now is a centerpiece of the scholar-activist's intellectual development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have found that gentrification is less likely in Black neighborhoods than in White or Latinx neighborhoods, and that gentrification looks different in Black neighborhoods. For example, researchers have found that Black neighborhoods experience marginal gentrification—changes in the educational level but not the income of residents. This study uses Census and National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) data to explore the relationship between gentrification and racial change in Washington, DC between 2000 and 2019. We measure gentrification using four distinct but related measures: change in home value, rent, average educational level, and household income. The results show a positive association between changes in the percentage of residents with college degrees and the percentage of White residents in neighborhoods that were majority Black in 2000. We also find a positive association between changes in the percentage of Latinx residents and the average rent. We do not find a significant relationship between racial change and changes in home value and average income. Our findings point to the importance of including race in models of gentrification as well as using different measures of gentrification to capture it more fully.

Brown and black leaders have led the assault on students in the United States protesting the genocide of Palestinians revealing, yet again, the bankruptcy of liberal inclusion and of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes more generally. In this essay, Deepa Kumar draws on Arun Kundnani’s book to lay out the structural roots of anti-Muslim racism. In contrast to liberal theories of Islamophobia, she argues that Kundnani has offered an incisive analysis of the neoliberal conditions that have produced anti-Muslim racism from the oil shocks of 1973 to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Such a structural analysis is vital if we are to end the ongoing suffering of Palestinians and of Muslims fleeing war-torn regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that the system of student debt functions as one of the most egregious and yet poorly understood mechanisms by which structural racism is reproduced in the U.S. today. We present evidence that student debt is unevenly distributed across race and gender, show that this pattern arises from policy choices made over time, and demonstrate that these disparities play a significant role in maintaining and exacerbating racial and gender wealth gaps. Our paper contends that the student debt crisis not only erodes the core principles of higher education but also perpetuates a cycle of racial and gender inequality and given the crucial role played by business corporations, urges scholars of business ethics to pay attention to this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we are situated in postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist epistemologies to study environmental racism in the Anthropocene—a new geological epoch where human activity has changed the functioning of the earth. Drawing from critiques of the Anthropocene, the concept of racial capitalism, as well as environmental justice and racism scholarship, we show how proposed solutions to the climate crisis overlook and may even exacerbate racial injustices faced by communities of color. We contend that a climate justice agenda that is grounded on racial justice is necessary for our scholarship to develop a racially just management and organization studies (MOS). To accomplish this agenda, we propose three shifts: from studying elite institutions to researching grassroots organizations concerned with climate and racial justice, from uncritical endorsement of global technologies to studying local adaptation by communities of color, and from offering decontextualized climate solutions to unraveling racial histories that can help us address racial and climate injustices. We discuss the implications of these shifts for management research and education and argue that MOS cannot afford to ignore climate justice and racial justice—they are both inextricably linked, and one cannot be achieved without the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nexus between environmental racism and racial capitalism has been well documented. However, the government is often blamed for the perpetuation of some forms of environmental racism. Nonetheless, blaming the government for environmental racism without documenting some actions and policy implementation by the government to mitigate or prevent the re-occurrence of environmental racism tends to be a one-sided view. Consequently, this study examines how the American government plays some roles in the occurrence of environmental racism, that is, the Flint Water Crisis (FWC) in Michigan. Racial capitalism theory is used as a theoretical lens in this study. Racial capitalism, historical residential housing policies, anti-blackness or devaluation of Black bodies, the appointment of Emergency Financial Managers, environmental racism, neoliberalism, laissez-faire, and color-blind racism were the mechanisms driving the occurrence of the FWC. The different actions and policies that were taken by the American government to mitigate or prevent the re-emergence of FWC were also documented. Although, these actions were taken after the occurrence of the FWC. The materials-based method (secondary data) was not only adopted to provide answers to the research question that this study answered but was also used to explain the global dynamic and operation of racial capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the central role that the work contract plays in the production and reproduction of Asian diasporic worlds. In light of the history of Asian indentured contract labor in the Americas, the article proposes that the "Asian American contract" emerges as an affirmation of the exchange of useful labor for a sense of belonging and world for the Asian American subject—even when this exchange comes at the expense of life. Through readings of Ling Ma's novel Severance (2018) and director Lee Isaac Chung's film Minari (2020), the article demonstrates how the contract ultimately transforms Asian Americans' reproductive labor—their childbearing and child-rearing—into their social reproduction as a racialized class of useful, compliant workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than the exception to an otherwise progressive intellectual environment in North American, and specifically Canadian universities, the suppression of speech related to Palestine reveals the racial limits of a settler-colonial liberal politics of acknowledgment and reconciliation. The mainstream or institutional conceptualisation of academic freedom does not address the structural racism and settler-colonial realities within which Canadian universities are embedded, rendering them as 'natural' allies for Israeli institutions and state practices. A complicated, if revealing, moment of exposure of the limits of the liberal script of reconciliation is the land acknowledgment, which has become, since October 2023, an opportunity grasped by some critical scholars to acknowledge the links between the ongoing genocide in Palestine and settler colonialism across Turtle Island. Tracing the oppositional functions of the land acknowledgment, this article exposes the political limits of a liberal racial order, which is explicitly challenged by expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial capitalism has received much attention within the social sciences over the past few decades, including fields such as urban geography and infrastructural studies. This state of the field identifies key contributions, highlights the latest developments, draws attention to limitations, and points to future directions. Given the concept's multiple iterations and lineages beyond Cedric Robinson's framework, there is a risk racial capitalism might become an empty signifier if more work is not done by scholars to define their points of departure, clarify the concept's theoretical reach, and expand empirical contributions beyond the U.S. heartland. To advance the racial capitalism body of work, current scholarship suggests theoretical conversations with postcolonial theory, decolonial thought, Indigenous studies, and feminist approaches. There is also a need to engage not only with other variants of racial capitalism, but also with earlier scholarship that investigates the interplay between race/racialization and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of the concept of "racial capitalism" has exploded over the past decade, penetrating both academic and activist circles. Two thinkers have been foundational to this revival: Cedric Robinson and Stuart Hall. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to merge these two thinkers into a single framework, we argue that they develop divergent, and potentially irreconcilable, theories of racial capitalism. Robinson and Hall both challenge an orthodox Marxism that crudely reads politics from class position, and both point to the constitutive roles of culture and racism in mass mobilisation. Yet they diverge in two key ways. First, they root their theories in incongruous systemic logics: Robinson emphasises racial differentiation and domination, whereas Hall emphasises the maintenance of capitalist hegemony. And second, Robinson's theories of domination and resistance are rooted in spatial connections, most importantly via Western racialism and what he calls the Black radical tradition, both of which envelop the globe. By contrast, Hall insists on the spatial fragmentation of domination and resistance, which emerge as conjunctural articulations in specific contexts. Challenging the idea that there is a singular racial capitalism lens or frame, we urge scholars and activists alike to rigorously interrogate the specific mechanisms linking racism and capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November and December of 2021, the Fraser Valley in southwest British Columbia suffered extreme flooding due to an atmospheric river. Although the event was attributed to climate change, I suggest that the recent floods must be understood through the historical geography of flood control infrastructure in the valley, particularly dikes. In this article, I trace the development of these infrastructures from the beginning of colonisation to the completion of the first state‐managed diking system in the early 20th century. I argue that at the same time as dikes secured land for settler farmers, they exposed Indigenous peoples to new hazards—ironically including floods—and multiplied the damage of future flood events. Building on geographic literature demonstrating the participation of dike infrastructure in racialised capital accumulation and settler colonialism, I highlight the way that dikes have abetted these projects through the uneven spatial production of vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of entrepreneurship, business, and economics have been reluctant to consider Hip Hop as a viable means for research and theory-building. Oddly enough, through the 1970s – a period that was generally characterized by stagnation and high unemployment – Hip Hop captivated audiences around the globe, creating innovative and diverse market opportunities for a host of different communities. The term 'Hip Hop Mogul' emerged to describe artists whose commercial viability appealed to varied sensibilities and disparate public spheres. Who are these Hip Hop Moguls? What are the interests of these Hip Hop Moguls? Drawing on lyrical content from a sample of Hip Hop Moguls (n = 15), we examine the discursive frameworks that make-up Moguldom, its politics, and its ways of being. Ultimately, our findings shed light on the different ways that marginalized communities negotiate antagonistic economic relations and disrupt traditional business paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical overview of neoliberalism scholarship from a queer sociological perspective. Despite mainstream neoliberalism scholarship neglecting sexuality as a system of intersecting power relations, sociologists of sexualities have explored how neoliberalism reshapes the state, market, society, and subjectivity concerning sex, intimacy, and sexual politics. Highlighting the intersection of the sociology of sexualities with transnational feminist and queer studies, as well as critical race studies, I advocate for a refined understanding of sexuality as integral to neoliberalism's operations with empire, colonialism, and racial capitalism. I suggest areas for future research to further develop this understanding, including the emphasis on the variegated nature of neoliberalism, its ambivalence and contradictions, and its promiscuous convergence with other political, social, and cultural formations. This article ultimately calls for a queer political economic analysis in the continued engagement with neoliberalism and its interactions with sexuality politics to understand new global challenges and social transformations, including shifting geopolitics, digital and platform economies, and climate and reproductive crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial capitalism depends on the reproduction of an existing racialized economic order. In this article, I argue that the disavowal of past injustice is a central way in which this reproduction is ensured and that market-based forms of knowledge production, such as for-profit predictive practices, play a crucial role in facilitating this disavowal. Recent debates about the fairness of algorithms, data justice, and predictive policing have intensified long-standing controversies, both popular and academic, about the way in which statistical and financial modes of accounting and predicting articulate, represent and produce ascriptive categories of hierarchically ordered social difference, and reproduce unjust social hierarchies and inequalities. These debates have productively problematized the racial lives of seemingly apolitical predictive technologies and demanded the re-politicization of predictive practices. What has been missing from these debates so far, however, is a more explicit engagement with ways in which anti-racist movements and activists themselves have contested the entanglements of prediction and race making. I turn to a recent prominent example, namely the contestation over racial discrepancies in subprime lending to examine how fair lending activists have conceptualized and troubled the reproduction of a racialized economic order through for-profit predictive practices in the decade before the Great Financial Crisis. I situate this particular example in the broader historical and political context of politicizing prediction that first emerged with the ascendancy of a liberal, individualist-proprietary conception of risk, and the political problem space to which this has given rise. My analysis shows that actuarial conceptions of fairness continue to reverberate in anti-racist contestations of for-profit predictive practices, and that they tend to marginalize and undercut more radical strands of critique of the racialization of financial markets. Insofar as these modalities of contestation implicitly reproduce a liberal, proprietary-individualist conception of risk, I argue, they fail to effectively challenge the quasi-alchemical transformation of injustice into personal responsibility, and thus contribute to the disavowal of past injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within integration programs and practices, refugee women are repeatedly offered rescue and emancipation. This article explores how emancipation intersects with material and social injustices of integration practices, and how refugee women in particular become subjects for emancipation. It examines the bordering practices of integration and emancipation, and identifies how integration practices symbolize refugee women as, here called, "oppressed," "spoiled," "willing," "surprisingly productive," or "familiar." It investigates how these symbolizations circulate in emancipatory practices that are steeped in national imaginaries, as well as in welfare state work ethics. Emancipation is confined to submission to exploitative reproductive work and tied to consumerism. But it also has ambivalent moments around regularizing refugee women's strategically needed care-work. The article suggests that differential emancipation reproduces complex and violent logics of gendered racial capitalism and coloniality of the Danish welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen an increasing recognition of the necessity to historicize and conceptualize ecological degradation in relation to capitalist and racist regimes of exploitation, epitomized by the popular concept of the "racial Capitalocene." While constituting an important effort to move beyond a color-blind environmentalism and class analysis, many of these accounts tend to abstract away from the place- and time-determined specificities of contemporary racial capitalism. This paper reconstructs the ecological thought latently present in the work of revolutionary theorists, activists, and life-long partners Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs to explore an alternative analysis. It shows that, as part of their analysis of automation of the capitalist production process, the Boggses developed a powerful account of environmental harm alongside social deprivation. Extrapolating their concepts of social and material "waste" and "wastelands," this paper argues that James and Grace Lee Boggs saw racist exploitation and ecological harm as intimately tied to the capitalist processes of valorization and devaluation. It shows that there emerges from their conjunctural analysis a novel theory of ecological racialization as well as some concrete implications for anti-capitalist, antiracist, and ecological struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, Christina Heatherton asks how racist conditions have persisted despite the proliferation of liberal antiracist language in the twenty-first century. Drawing on Arun Kundnani’s book, she describes how racist conditions have multiplied just as antiracist organizers have been robbed of the very language to describe them. She considers how the book intervenes against impasses in critical theory. She also describes how Kundnani's work speaks to a currently evolving period of political struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Budgets are often thought of as boring, invoking the tedium of bookkeeping. The summer of 2020 suggested otherwise. As America's plague of police brutality combined with the death-dealing blows of the COVID-19 pandemic and a wave of urban uprising gripped US cities, activists turned their organising attention to municipal budgeting. From Seattle to Atlanta, demands rang out for cities to #defund the police, rethink public safety and adopt budgets for the people. Since then, the people's budget movement has grown in strength at the municipal level, including in Los Angeles, Chicago, Louisville, Jacksonville, Minneapolis and Nashville, among other cities. What should urban studies scholars make of these struggles and from the aspirations and visions that impel them? This paper uses a case study of the Nashville People's Budget Coalition (NPBC) to examine how municipal budgeting processes and public financing have become new sites of theorisation, debate and political intervention. We demonstrate how the people's budget movement offers a new calculus for municipal budgeting that radically reconceptualises the logics of value and care that underpin economic thought and public accounting practices. We conclude by considering avenues through which a scholarly agenda for economic democracy in solidarity with movement organisers could be expanded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]