Socialism and Empire: Labor, Migration, and Racial Politics

Inés Valdez, Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, joins the New Dawn Podcast and discusses the role of labor and migration as a form of racial politics. As a critical race and feminist theorist, Valdez's research agenda has engaged issues of migration, transnationalism, empire, and racial capitalism. Her first book, Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft, was published by Cambridge and makes the case that cosmopolitanism must be transnational. Valdez's numerous articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Citizenship Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Political Research Quarterly, Political Theory, and Theory & Event. (This episode was originally recorded in June 2021.)

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Professor Charles W. Mills. To celebrate his life, New Dawn is re-releasing the episode Michael recorded with Charles almost two years ago called, "Retheorizing (Racial) Justice." Please enjoy the conversation and help us say goodbye to a tremendous teacher, scholar, and racial justice advocate. 

Michael Dawson and Charles Mills discuss the relationship between capitalism and white supremacy, how philosophers can follow the examples set by political theorists, the manifestations of white supremacy in the academy, and more in this invigorating episode of New Dawn.

Suggested Links

For a biography on Charles Mills and more about his published work, click here.

John Rawls's Collected Papers

In this episode of New Dawn, Michael C. Dawson along with special guest host, Charisse Burden Stelly, invite Dr. Takiyah Harper-Shipman, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Professor Harper-Shipman is particularly interested in the ways in which discourse structures political economies of development, human rights, and-more recently-gender. Her first book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (Routledge), examined how development stakeholders in Burkina Faso and Kenya negotiate "owning development" in their local contexts. Professor Harper-Shipman is currently at work on another project that explores legacies of population control in human rights approaches to family planning.

In this special two-part series, the Race & Capitalism's Post-Graduate Fellow, Charisse Burden-Stelly, is in conversation with writer, rapper, director, and filmmaker, Boots Riley. Part II focuses on the new Biden administration, Riley's new show, "I'm a Virgo," being released by Amazon, and the future of labor organizing in the U.S. and around the world. 

In this special two-part series, the Race & Capitalism's Post-Graduate Fellow, Charisse Burden-Stelly, is in conversation with writer, rapper, director, and filmmaker, Boots Riley. Part I was produced and sponsored by the Claudia Jones School for Political Education. 

In this episode of New Dawn, Michael Dawson invites Brandi Thompson Summers to the show. Summers is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz. Her research engages theoretical themes that cut across multiple domains of social life. Summers builds epistemological and methodological insights from cultural and urban geography, urban sociology, African American studies, and media studies by examining the cultural, political, and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered. Her first book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press), explores how aesthetics and race converge to locate or map Blackness in Washington, D.C. Summers has published several articles and essays in both academic and popular publications, including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, New York Times, Boston Globe, and The Funambulist.

K-Sue Park joins Michael Dawson to launch Season 5 of New Dawn. Park is an Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown University. She has written extensively on foreclosure, land, dispossession, and displacement. Her publications have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, The History of the Present, Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, and the New York Times. (Due to some unavoidable technical issues, the beginning of the episode is a bit distorted. Thank you for your patience and for tuning in.)

“Anti-Black Violence and the Ongoing Fight for Freedom” was a live conversation held on July 7, 2020. Megan Ming Francis moderated the discussion between Barbara Ransby, Juliet Hooker, and Vesla Weaver. They discuss what the current moment reveals, the power of radical imagination in black struggle, and how to keep the momentum.

Selected Publications by these scholars:

Francis, Megan Ming. Civil Rights and the Making of the American Modern State (2014).

Hooker, Juliet. Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (2017)

— Race and the Politics of Solidarity (2009)

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2013)

— Making All Black Lives Matter: Re-imagining Freedom in the 21st Century (2018)

Weaver, Vesla. Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control (with Amy Lerman) (2014)

Suggested Readings:

Hanchard, Michael G. The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (2018)

Hannah-Jones, Nikkole. “It Is Time for Reparations” (June 2020)

Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2003)

In this episode, Michael Dawson chats with Charisse Burden-Stelly (Asst. Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College) about her research on W.E.B Du Bois, as well as lessons his scholarship has to offer as we think through building social movements today.

Charisse Burden-Stelly and Gerald Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History

Suggested Readings:

Hannah Appel, The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea (2019)

Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892)

Megan Ming Francis, “The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture” (2019)

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019)

Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (2016)

Claudia Jones, Beyond Containment (edited by Carole Boyce Davies) (2011)

Kelly Miller, “The Risk of Women’s Suffrage” (1915)

Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940 (2018)

This episode is a recording of a conversation between Michael Dawson, Rhea Boyd, Aresha Martinez-Cardoso, and Brandi Summers during an event titled "COVID-19 and Racial Inequities: Unpacking the Anti-Black Response," on June 25, 2020.

Rhea Boyd, MD, MPH, FAAP works clinically at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and teaches nationally on the relationship between structural racism, inequity and health, and has a decade of experience advancing community-based advocacy. She leads efforts to characterize and address the child and public health impacts of harmful policing practices and policies. She serves as the Chief Medical Officer of San Diego 211, working with navigators to address social needs of San Diegans impacted by chronic illness and poverty. And she is the Director of Equity and Justice for The California Children's Trust, an initiative to advance mental health access to children and youth across California.

Aresha Martinez-Cardoso, PhD is a public health researcher and Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. Her research integrates theoretical perspectives from the social sciences with epidemiological methods in public health to examine how social inequality in the US shapes population health, with a particular focus on the health of racial/ethnic groups and immigrants. The majority of her work focuses on how race, migration, and class intersect to shape the the health of US-born and immigrant Latinxs across the life-course.

Brandi Summers, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines urban cultural landscapes and the political and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered. She is also the author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, which explores how aesthetics and race converge to locate or map blackness in Washington, D.C.

Suggested Links & Readings:

Learn more about Moms 4 Housing

Berwick, Don. “The Moral Determinants of Health.” JAMA. Published online June 12, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.11129

Laster Pirtle, Whitney N. “Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States.” Health Education & Behavior, (April 2020). doi:10.1177/1090198120922942.

Sewell, Abigail A., Kevin A. Jefferson, Hedwig Lee. “Living under surveillance: Gender, psychological distress, and stop-question-and-frisk policing in New York City.” Social Science & Medicine, Volume 159, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.04.024.