Fall 2021
Siddhant Issar - "Mapping the Logics of Contemporary Racial Capitalism"
October 27, 2021
How should we understand contemporary anti-Black racism and its intergenerational reproduction? Why are Black and Indigenous populations disproportionately impacted by crises, whether it be the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 or the current Covid-19 pandemic? To address these questions, this talk thinks with the Movement for Black Lives to put forth a critical theory of racial capitalism. Such a theory maps the changing relations between racial slavery and its afterlives, ongoing Indigenous dispossession, and American capital accumulation. This framework, in turn, reveals how the contemporary neoliberal era (and its corresponding crises) expands and generalizes extant logics of racial and colonial expropriation. In terms of politically contesting the racial order, the talk also considers how the framework of racial capitalism emphasizes forms of solidarity and coalition building that eschew an emphasis on homogeneity, redirecting progressive and left politics past false binaries between anti-racist, decolonial, and anti-capitalist struggles.
Siddhant Issar is a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching interests lie in Black and Indigenous political thought, modern and contemporary political theory, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the politics of race, class, and settler colonialism in the US. His work has been published in Contemporary Political Theory, Race & Class, The Black Scholar, and in an edited volume, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. Issar is currently working on a book manuscript, titled Theorizing Racial Capitalism in the Era of Black Lives Matter.
Issar holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, respectively.
Jordie Davies - "Alienated Activism: Activation, Education, and Mobilization"
November 11, 2021
Davies theorizes the concept of “alienated activism,” which describes both the political orientation and political engagement of a range of leftist, progressive, and racial justice activists in Chicago. This talk demonstrates how political alienation can serve as grounds for political activism when coupled with processes of political education. Individuals can become alienated from the political system through their experiences as marginalized people, through disappointing and isolating political institutions and conditions, and/or through solidarity with marginalized groups. Through mechanisms of political education, alienated activists engage in politics via relational political activities, such as political organizing; through familial and collective movement space; and with transformative political strategies. This essay attends closely to anti-carceral and racial justice activism in Chicago.
Dr. Jordie Davies is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the P3 Lab at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a Visiting Scholar at UC Irvine's Center for the Study of Democracy. She received her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago. Jordie’s research and writing interests include Black politics and political thought, US social movements, and Black feminism. Her research agenda focuses on the influence of social movements on political attitudes, activism, and political participation. Jordie’s book project Alienated Activism: The Political Possibilities of Black Lives Matter proposes the framework “Alienated Activism” to describe social movements and political participation in response to crises in legitimation and neoliberalism, especially the Black Lives Matter movement. She is in the process of converting her dissertation into a book manuscript.
Her research has been supported by Berkeley’s Center on Democracy and Organizing, and she was awarded the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, the Diversifying Faculty in Illinois Fellowship, and the APSA Minority Fellows Grant. Jordie has published research and review essays in Social Science Quarterly, Ideology, Theory, Practice, and the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.
Jordie holds a Master of Arts in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. She received a BA in Political Science from Emory University, in Atlanta, GA, with a minor in Educational Studies.