Prison Capital by Dr. Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020.

Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy. Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.

Footloose: the work of location consultants in shaping US economic development

In this talk I will present ongoing research on the location consulting industry. From its origins in the 1919 Fantus Factory Locating Service in Chicago site selectors have come to play an extraordinarily influential role in brokering between companies seeking sites for investment and the communities seeking to attract that investment. In a series of papers with Nicholas Phelps we have documented the work of location consultants in effectively enabling the relocation of firms within the United States. I draw on archival work to describe the way in which Fantus accumulated a detailed geographical knowledge in order to make its recommendations about preferred sites for corporate investment.   From the 1950s onwards Fantus was also contracted by cities and States to provide advice on their economic development efforts. In doing so Fantus – and other location consultants that followed – were able to structure the landscape of economic development in the United States. I use the concept of the “business climate” -an index first developed by Fantus - to demonstrate how location consultants have effectively enabled and intensified the competition between communities for corporate investment and accordingly the increasingly footloose nature of US capitalism.   

I have a BA degree in Geography from Liverpool University, MA and PhD in Geography from Ohio State University and have held faculty positions at Sheffield University, the University of Oklahoma and - since 2006 - the University of Kentucky. My research is focused on two related areas. The first is the political dynamics of urban development. The second - and the focus in this presentation - is the endemic tension between the mobility and fixity of economic forms, activities and practices. The geographic 'stickiness' of economic activity is key to ongoing research with Nicholas Phelps (University of Melbourne) examining the growth and development of the location consulting industry. Findings from the research are set out in recent papers in Journal of Economic Geography, Business History, Environment and Planning A and Annals of the AAG.

The story of the lungs, or how atmospheric racism becomes embodied 

In this talk, I share stories of illness and death, as well as of survival and care, from Black workers and their families in a Southern aluminum company town. For Black workers, whose lungs toiled to maintain life under the burden of toxic wastes, shortness of breath and diagnoses such as COPD are symptomatic of an underlying pathology: a racist world that perverts the essential matter sustaining life into a tool of systematic violence. In these excerpts from my book, A Toxic Alchemy, I adopt Frantz Fanon’s description of colonialism as “atmospheric” violence to describe how racism becomes embodied through taking in contaminated air, and how the struggle for breath asks us to refuse the premise of disposability and demand a reimagining of the world. 

Pavithra Vasudevan (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Their research addresses toxicity as a manifestation of racial violence, capitalist entanglements with state and science, and the abolitional possibilities of collective struggle. Vasudevan is a recipient of the 2022-23 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for her first book project, A Toxic Alchemy: Race and Waste in Industrial Capitalism. Their research is grounded in collaboration and creative praxis, reimagining scholarship as storytelling in service to building a better world. 

 https://pavithravasudevan.com

This workshop is prioritized for the graduate students in the Department of Geography. Please RSVP by emailing Teri Crutcher.

More information coming soon!

More information coming soon!