This dissertation is situated at the intersection of critical philosophy of race, affect theory, and new media studies. The dominant questions of my research consider what new problems and avenues of thought the digital age and social media open up for the study of race. This focus includes the ways...
This dissertation interrogates the relationship between affect and blackness, as it is intimated in the materiality of water and its attendant sensations. My methodology draws from black feminist theory and metaphors extracted from the natural and neurosciences. In so doing, I grapple with the following questions, as they relate to...
This dissertation examines the origins and social impact of New York stop-and-frisk law, which authorizes police to stop, question and frisk people without a warrant or probable cause to believe crime was committed. Several observers associate it with a recent history of racial profiling, or conservative policing practices of 1990s...
This dissertation provides a socio-spatial account of black anarchism that emerges from a central concern with the practice of slaves’ jumps from the slave ship. It demonstrates how a substantive theoretical attention to these jumps generates possibilities for thinking about black radical politics differently. Through death, mobility, destruction, and escape,...
This dissertation considers the ways do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism is promoted, taken up, and responded to by the black middle class. Using thirty-eight interviews and one year of ethnographic observation in the Northwest Detroit neighborhood of Bagley, I document the following findings. First, many DIY projects have come from government and...