Place, Race, and Power
Brian Highsmith
Harvard University
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 racialized hierarchy, corporate power, and the terms of democratic citizenship. The first part of the course 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. During the second part, we will study two primary case studies: mass punishment (covering such issues as prison gerrymandering and local governments’ reliance on regressive fines and fees that are generated through over-policing) and the “company town” (considering parallels between historical employer-owned communities and contemporary legal structures like special purpose districts and homeowners’ associations).
Assigned texts will include long-form journalism, public policy reports, historical context, legal scholarship, and recent social science. This course will be taught in the style of a graduate school seminar: reading expectations will be comparatively high (but achievable!) and grading will be primarily based on productive written and oral contributions to our collective task of learning together. The primary goals of this course will be to first 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 then to apply the resulting insights to contemporary policy problems.