Contact
Email us at berkeleyblackgeography@gmail.com
Economic geography, constructions and infrastructures of poverty, inequality, race (blackness), economy, and the market; the Caribbean (esp. Jamaica) and African-American communities
563 McCone Hall
I am an Assistant Professor of African-American Studies and Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the co-chair of the Economic Disparities Research Cluster at Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (HIFIS). I received my Ph.D. in Anthropology from the London School of Economics.
My research examines race through the economic ethics, rationalizations, and practices that organize the lived experience of poverty and inequality in the Caribbean and the United States. My work in Jamaica, where I researched what I called the “sufferation” economy, explored the social practices and cultural forms that facilitate the locating, reconciling, and normalizing of structural economic and social inequality through local market frames. My current research in Tulsa, Oklahoma is concerned with the structural and infrastructural frictions of poverty.
Across these various geographies, my interests remain situated within the landscape of adverse economic circumstances, at scales ranging from the ethical to the global, especially when the adversity is the result of racial inequality, or a more structural economic deficiency or failure. I am especially interested in how race frames the experiences of those challenges and how a lack of resources is reconciled through attempts to rectify or simply cope with its absence. This theme runs through my published work, as well as my current book project, provisionally titled, Reparative Circuits: Crime, Capital and Postcolonial Connection in Jamaica. Reparative Circuits examines how disadvantaged black youth in Jamaica engaged in the practice of international “lottery scamming” mobilize a reparative logic of seizure in utilizing the development apparatuses of internet communication technology, customer service procedures, and money transfer services, to secure economic and social mobility.
Geography as history of the present and as Earth/world-writing, social theory, political economy, development, agrarian studies, labor and work, racial/sexual capitalism, Black radical tradition, biopolitical struggle, oceanic humanities, photography, South Asia, South Africa, Indian Ocean.
Sharad Chari is Associate Professor in Geography, and has taught at the University of Michigan, the London School of Economics and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where he remains affiliated to the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WiSER). He is the author of Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, self-made men and globalization in provincial India (Stanford and Permanent Black, 2004) and The Development Reader (Routledge, 2008), and is completing a book on racial capitalism and opposition in South Africa called Apartheid Remains. This project centers on neighborhoods in Durban, South Africa, stuck between oil refineries and other industry in a valley that traps pollution and foists its burden on Black people racialized ‘Indian’ and ‘Coloured’ in South African racial capitalism. Apartheid Remains asks how post-apartheid struggles face a set of obstacles inherited from various pasts, it revisits the twentieth century history of state racism and Black struggle to ask how biopolitical tools used to build segregation might have been used to break it down, and turns to critical arts of Black survival in local blues traditions, not least in photography, that conserve the seeds of a post-apartheid future, perhaps for the world at large. This work, and teaching in South Africa, has forced me to try to make explicit the links between Black radical praxis and Marxist agrarian studies, to think about how South Africa and the Indian Ocean littoral allows us to ‘stretch’ the Black radical tradition in new ways. I have begun preliminary work on a new research project that explores archaic and emergent dynamics around port cities of the Southern African Indian Ocean Region, with an attention to the South African and Mozambican littoral, and the islands of Mauritius, Reunion, and Mayotte/the Comores. This research will also rethink geographical form as it revisits some of the key concerns of Black Marxism and Marxist political economy from the perspective of this Afro-Asian oceanic space, where the ‘Black Atlantic’ meets the nonlinear currents of the Indian Ocean. Photography returns in unexpected ways in this project.
Diaspora, Black Europe, Science and Technology Studies
McCone 199
camilla.hawthorne@berkeley.edu
My dissertation, “‘There Are No Black Italians’? Race and Citizenship in the Black Mediterranean,” explores racism, national belonging, and the cultural politics of Blackness in contemporary Italy. I am specifically interested in the practices by which the Italian-born children of African immigrants engage with the question of whether it is possible to be both Black and and Italian. My work intersects with Black European studies, diaspora theory, and postcolonial/feminist science and technology studies.
My research has been supported by sources including the Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, and the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. I am affiliated with the Mobility and Politics Emerging Scholars Research Collective as well as the SLAN.G Research Network. I am currently serving as Secretary-Treasurer of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers and sit on the international advisory board for ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. In addition to my doctoral work, I am also project manager of the Summer School on Black Europe, held each summer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Visual Studies, Critical Race & Digital Technologies, New Media Studies, Science & Technology Studies, Oakland and the Bay Area, Black Geographies
My research investigates how smartphone photography and social media are used by black activists and entrepreneurs in Oakland to create alternate imaginaries and epistemologies of place. I interrogate how everyday visual representation of black life shapes material and virtual political communities, and specifically what this means for a region grappling with displacement and equitable access to jobs in the tech sector. I bring my experience as an Environmental Analysis major, Art Photography minor at Pitzer College and environmental justice political advocate in Oakland and the Bay Area into this work. I currently serve on the Programming Committee for the Black Geographies Specialty Group for the American Association of Geographers.