Place, Race, and Power
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 overpolicing) and the “company town” (considering parallels between historical employer-owned communities and contemporary legal structures like special purpose districts and homeowners’ associations).