Temple University Press Journals
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Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, by Stuart Schrader
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When Your Mentee Is Denied Tenure: Reflections on Lorgia García-Peña’s Work
No full textThis essay examines the role of hate crimes, structural racism, and the lack of transparency in Harvard’s denial of Lorgia García-Peña’s tenure case. As a rebuttal to the lack of explanation for why the decision was made, the essay analyzes the deep impact of García-Peña’s scholarship on a global scale
Living Barriers and the Emotional Labor of Accessing Care from the Margins
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the deeply entrenched inequalities and barriers in the U.S. healthcare system. Past research would suggest that extant barriers to care for undocumented immigrant communities, such as those pertaining to citizenship status, class, race, language fluency, and employment status as well as increased demands for documentation, fear of deportation, and general mistrust in the public healthcare system (Heyman, Nuñez, and Talavera 2009; Flores 2015; Hacker et al. 2015), would be amplified within the pandemic climate, making access to care even more difficult. Building from my research on undocumented motherhood and health access, I explore the emotional labor performed by undocumented communities in navigating multiple barriers to accessing public health services as a way to think more deeply about the struggles these communities may be facing during the current COVID-19 pandemic, but also as a way to imagine what kind of work might be required fundamentally to remove barriers to health and improve long-term access to care for the most vulnerable communities
The Church Is Essential: COVID-19 and the Hyperlocal Politics of Mutual Aid in Black and Latina/o Churches
No full textThis article explores the work of Latina/o and African American churches in New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston as they serve their communities and, in the midst of a pandemic, are fundamentally reimaging the relationship between religion and society in hyperlocal sites. A focus on neighborhood churches provides a particularly clear view of how mutual aid is practiced and informed by a relational and horizontal orientation as much as it is rooted in a social ethic with strict expectations around charity. Churches are often criticized for their vertical and heavenly focus, but for many churches, the pandemic radically changed that orientation, prompting them to redirect their efforts toward supporting the spiritual and physical wellbeing of their Black and Brown parishioners and other community members. As churches became sites for food distribution, transformed their sanctuaries into classrooms, and joined Black Lives Matter protests, they renewed their commitment to a radical religious tradition grounded in concerns around economic, racial, and immigrant justice
Essentially Surplus: The Struggle for the California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights (AB 241) and the Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery
No full textThis article offers an account of the relationship between “essential” and the category of labor by examining how reproductivity, as the foundation—what is essential—to all work, life, and sociality, is, as Kalindi Vora argues, rendered (and renders those who perform it) into racialized surplus, a condition of devaluation and disposability premised on the extraction and exhaustion of life. I draw on a year of ethnographic research with domestic worker activists following the 2014 implementation of California’s Domestic Worker Bill of Rights (AB 241). This breakthrough bill overturned domestic and at-home care worker labor exclusions grounded in New Deal labor legislation that shored up the rights (and category) of the industrial worker and offered major concessions for organized labor while legally cementing the exploitation and unfree labor conditions of the South’s Black women domestic workers. Rather than positioning California migrant women’s domestic worker activism as a compelling teleological and linear challenge and victory against Jim Crow–era exclusion, however, I tarry in the overlap and disjuncture that such tied fates represent under settler racial capital and demonstrate how this alternative tracing of reproductivity confounds notions of labor, value, and inclusion at the core of the U.S. racial liberal state. I contend that the conditions of New Deal industrial capitalism, shaped as they were by Jim Crow anti-Blackness and the afterlife of reproductive slavery, now form the originary knot through which current-day racialized migrant women’s reproductive labor and life is appropriated under the neoliberal reorganization of care in the United States. I term this atemporal modality of racialized extraction essentially surplus, a “racializing process” that subsumes the life and bodies of racialized migrant women as if they essentially occupy the same category of surplus life occupied by Black women domestic workers historically
Resisting Colonial Deaths: Marginalized Black Populations and COVID-19 in Brazil and Kenya
No full textThe marginalized in Brazil and Kenya, poor Black and Brown bodies, are caught up in colonial and localized regimes of anti-Blackness and complementary regimes of transnational biopolitical governance. In this regard, while they are under siege by colonial borderlines and racialized class dynamics, they are also subject to the surveillance and interventions reserved for those variously defined as displaced and even “refugees,” as but a few examples. These framings of their lives make them continuously at risk of what, borrowing from Frantz Fanon, we understand as colonial deaths. These are the deaths in what he termed the “colonized sector,” where the marginalized are “dying anywhere and from anything.” These populations are, at once, the target of police killings, evictions, and deportations, in addition to having a high vulnerability to becoming COVID-19 fatalities. Building on the praxis contributions of Black and Brown activists in Brazil and Kenya, this reflective article seeks to answer the following three questions: How have the Black and Brown bodies most at risk in these two sites experienced the further uncertainties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic? What does lockdown mean for those vulnerable to colonial deaths: those who have no citizenship claims to medical care or even homes to shelter in? What lessons can be learned from the local grassroots activisms for these populations, and what work needs to be done to translate these local strategies across Global South geographies
The “Essential Worker” in the Time of Corona: Ethnic Studies and a Legacy Canceled in the Napa Valley
No full textAs the wrath of COVID-19 among the poor and BIPOC communities continued into summer 2021 and beyond, and so did the uprisings. Calls to defund the police entered mainstream discourse, as did calls to abolish prisons. Connecting the pandemic and the renewal of social justice mass struggle leads to a new appreciation of ethnic studies as a decolonial practice. Ethnic studies itself has become one of the “essential workers” needed to assess the present conjuncture. Yet for that very reason, ethnic studies is also presently under attack at local, national, and international levels. It is within this context that I situate how the elimination of the Legacy Youth Project (LYP) in Napa, California —the only ethnic studies program offered at some local schools—became a dangerous reality for K–12 students