Contesting Racial Capitalism: Urban Redevelopment and Community Resistance

Undergraduate / Graduate

Theories of racial capitalism increasingly shape how critical urban scholars and activists understand contemporary forms of inequality, precarity, and social marginalization. Much of this theoretical work, however, operates at high levels of abstraction and offers relatively little guidance to empirical research or strategic community resistance. This course appraises recent approaches to urbanization advanced within a racial-capitalist framework, probing in particular their different conceptions of urban redevelopment and socio-spatial change as well as their potential implications for community organization and struggle. Focusing largely on Chicago, we will examine a series of redevelopment conflicts in different areas of the city in order in generate empirically informed and strategically relevant insights into the complex dynamics of race, class, and urban conflict in contemporary capitalism.