Interview: Kyla Schuller on Race Science and the Biopolitics of Feeling – Epistemic Unruliness 22: Join John as he interviews Kyla Schuller (Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers) about her new book The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke UP, 2017). The book develops concepts of impressibility and sentimentalism in order to interrogate practices of race science, race-making, and sex differentiation in 19th century America (and beyond). The conversation opens with an exploration of sentimental biopower and race as a spatio-temporal formation assigning c ..read more

This book is brilliant and I’m very excited to interview Schuller this week ..read more

Ep. 52 – Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages: We’re back, and with an episode featuring frequent guest of the show Sid Issar joining Rachel and John! The trio engages with a two-part article (here and here) by Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.” How does Heng’s work reconfigure the temporality of race and racism? What does race-making look like in the Middle Ages, and how does that change our political analyses of the present? In what ways does medieval race-making consolidate whiteness? What genealogies of racialization are lost w ..read more

The “Enigma of Biopolitics”: Antiblackness, Modernity, and Roberto Esposito’s Biopolitics: My new article, in Political Theory. The abstract:What would it mean to take antiblackness seriously in theories of biopolitics? How would our understanding of biopolitics change if antiblack racialization and slavery were understood as the paradigmatic expression of biopolitical violence? This essay thinks through the significance of black studies scholarship for disentangling biopolitics’ paradoxes and dilemmas. I argue that only by situating antiblackness as constitutive of modernity and of modern bio ..read more

The intro the conference paper @amybessschiller​ and I are working on:Introduction: Alexa, Can You Pass the Turing Test?Perusing lists of suggested uses for Amazon’s Alexa written by a variety of tech and lifestyle websites, a common theme emerges of commanding her—and all these articles refer to the Alexa device as “her”—to manage a variety of domestic labor tasks. Frequent recommendations are to have her: suggest recipes; manage your personal schedule; keep track of to-do lists and shopping lists; change the light, heat, or air conditioning in your smart home; order delivery food; use an app ..read more

Teaching the Political Theory Canon – AAP Pedagogy Hour: Join us for this special episode of the AAP – special because all of your hosts are actually in the same place, and special because we devote the whole episode to pedagogy. Rachel, John, and previous guest host Siddhant Issar convene in St. Louis  to discuss what it means to teach the political theory canon in our contemporary political situation. How important are all these dead white European men in shaping the politics of today? What is the best way to engage students in teaching the canon? How can one both teach the canon – as many h ..read more

about done with my conference paper for APSA. from the intro:What, then, makes Sotomayor’s dissent so remarkable? Numerous commentators noted Sotomayor’s citations to James Baldwin, Michelle Alexander, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, critiques of police practices, and potential allusions to #BlackLivesMatter. In this paper I read Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah v. Strieff as a mode of black political thinking, or at least put her dissent in conversation with black thought. To do so, I take up the aspects of her dissent picked up on by media outlets, but also theorize her writing as a form of political pheno ..read more

Interview: Charles Mills on Racial Liberalism: In this very special episode, John talks with Charles W. Mills (Philosophy, The Graduate Center, CUNY) about his new book, Black Rights/White Wrong: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2017). Mills walks us through some of the main arguments and concepts from the book, including the terminology of racial liberalism, the importance of white supremacy as a concept, his critiques of Kant and Rawls, the prospects for a “black radical liberalism,” and much more. But, the two build out the conversation to also discuss whiteness in the academy ..read more

I’m working on a conference paper about Sonia Sotomayor, and especially her dissent in Utah v. Strieff (2016). One part of the paper uses Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology to try to think through what Sotomayor is doing in the dissent. Here’s some of what I wrote today, in draft form:  Sotomayor’s dissent pushes further than its citational practices alone. This section argues that Sotomayor constructs, in Part IV of the dissent, a phenomenology of the bodily experience of being stopped and searched, which I explore through Sara Ahmed’s theorization of a “phenomenology of ‘being stopped.’”(200 ..read more