Place, Race, and Power

This seminar explores how place structures power in the American political economy. We will focus, in particular, on the consequences of our institutional design: how the law mediates the relationships between economic geography and structural corporate power, processes of social categorization, and the terms of democratic citizenship. The first part of the seminar considers how law helps determine where people reside and where mobile capital locates; the remainder explores how and why “place” matters for economic opportunity and political representation. We will consider this relationship through three primary case studies: concentrated poverty (focusing on racialized processes of exclusion and dispossession); mass punishment (covering such issues as prison gerrymandering and local governments’ reliance on regressive fines and fees that are generated through overpolicing); and the “company town” (considering parallels between historical employer-owned communities and contemporary legal structures like special purpose districts and homeowners’ associations). The primary goals of this course will be to understand the hidden stakes of geography—as shaped by the laws that govern contestation over local jurisdictional boundaries, and the institutional arrangements that give those boundaries meaning—and apply the resulting insights to contemporary policy problems.