The point, after all, is to change the world.
Comunista!, my dad exclaims as we are driving down US-1. We’re in Miami, Florida, where I grew up, and someone has cut him off in traffic. My whole family is in the car, a silver Toyota Previa minivan–yes, the one that looked like an egg. My mother is in the passenger seat; my older siblings, […]
Is neoliberalism dead at last? This is an urgent question that needs some provisional resolution – not just because of the proliferation of excellent scholarship on the variegated forms and consequences of global neoliberalism, but also because the question has political and strategic value in understanding capitalism as it is today. Scholars have been marking […]
In November 2022, FTX, the third largest crypto exchange platform collapsed and its CEO, Samuel Bankman-Fried, underwent trial in October 2023 for seven different charges of fraud. How did this happen? How could one of the main actors in the crypto industry not comply with U.S. laws? The answer is that there is no federal […]
A Case Study of the Proposed “Women’s Center for Justice” in NYC and Movement Efforts When one jail closes, it does not mean that another newer, more modern or more “progressive” cage should exist. Reformers have been working towards a proposed “gender-expansive” jail in New York City’s Harlem called the “Women’s Center for Justice.” The […]
The Problem Students of color, disabled students, and disempowered students are targeted and victimized by School Resource Officers (SROs). Students of color are subjected to violence and arrests by SROs, creating lasting harm in their lives, and further sustaining the school-to-prison pipeline. Much like with community law enforcement, studies suggest that SROs have been disproportionately […]
Introduction Who deserves to have a voice on issues that matter? In polarized debates on issues such as guns, abortion, and immigration, a constellation of activists contends to be heard and advocate for their point of view. To win attention, an activist strives to present themself as someone who deserves to be heard. Activists frame […]
“Knowledge is power” is a truism that the surveillance state has taken to extremes. Technological advances have opened an unprecedented level of information-gathering and hyper-localized knowledge about where people are, what they are doing, and who they are doing it with, pushing social control to new frontiers. Effective resistance in our era requires a strategy […]
Abstract: This article reviews the historical examples of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Soviet Revolution of 1917, focusing on police and armed bodies policy. The article reviews relevant literature as a primary source of evidence. I depart from the idea that progressive movements today have forgotten that these two historical examples gave us […]
Abstract Street vendors are usually immigrants or people of color who organize and mobilize an enterprise to serve their own ethnic communities working long hours for very little profit (Portes 1981; Wilmot 2014). A great deal of academic literature views street vendors as part of the informal economy solely as vendors with only a few […]
The fact that social media data are public, are known to be public, and sell themselves partly on their public nature has allowed anyone with a purpose —e.g., academic researchers, government agencies, and private firms— to access and collect data, confronting few, if any, formal ethical challenges. Regulations differ between social media platforms and across […]
2023 marks the 50th anniversary of mass incarceration in the United States. This period also saw wide-ranging laws and regulations that diminish the rights and privileges for those convicted of crimes – including the right to vote. More than 19 million people in the United States have felony convictions triggering civil sanctions, which often includes […]
Last fall the Sentencing Project released Locked Out 2022, the fourth in a series of public reports on U.S. felony disenfranchisement prepared in a partnership with my academic research team (Uggen, Larson, Shannon, and Stewart 2022). Disenfranchisement here refers to the practice of denying voting rights to people convicted of felony-level criminal convictions. The United […]