In this conversation recorded at the Futures of Finance Retreat, Prof Veena Dubal and Prof Rohan Grey discuss the implications of new regulatory regimes for poor consumers and working-class people as would-be investors in crypt-currency and "employees" of ride-share companies. Rohan talks about his research and policy proposals on a responsible, transformative approach to regulating digital currencies - "we do need a world that values anonymity as a primary concern". Veena explains Uber, Lyft and ride sharing companies are experimenting on Black and brown bodies with totalising new automated technologies of algorithmic discrimination. As Veena argues, "more terrifying than ChatGPT is the automation of labour extraction, the automation of labour surveillance, and the automation of dispossession."

In this conversation Emily Katzenstein, Hannah Appel, and Michael Dawson discuss the origins and aims of the Futures of Finance Project. It is a culmination of Michael's and Hannah's shared interest to build networks of people in and out of the academy to deal with inequality in many forms: along the lines of gender and sexuality, race, and class, to understand them as academics and try to build transformative social movements as well. As Michael says, "Building for the future is not a luxury, we won't survive if we won't build that future".

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)