You are invited to attend the 11/18 book manuscript workshop featuring Jodi Melamed from Marquette University and Dr. Lynn Itagaki’s book manuscript. This book workshop is for Lynn Itagaki's book manuscript, which will be discussed by Jodi Melamed. This is going to be a fun and informative event for anybody who is considering, currently, or eventually writing a manuscript of their own. We do ask that you RSVP to WGST@missouri.edu (from the email address you plan to attend the zoom session with) in order to get the zoom link and access to Dr. Itagaki’s manuscript.
Jodi Melamed is associate professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette University. She is the author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and has published many articles and chapters in a wide array of journals and editions. She is a co-editor of a recent volume of Social Text focused on “Economies of Dispossession.” Her current book project, Dispossession by Administration, investigates the diffuse and deadly capacities of administrative power to give impunity to racial capitalist violence through seemingly neutral repertoires of ‘democratic’, ‘procedural’, and ‘technical’ governance. Jodi Melamed is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, including a Fulbright, a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship, and grants from the American Studies Association, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation and the Wisconsin Humanities Council.
Isms and Algorithms: The Race for Finance, The Gender of Money
Buy a house. Take on the biggest loan of your life. Get a college degree for you or your kids. Take on another huge loan. Save money and invest it if you can. Risk your savings on the uncertain future, the stock market, land and property values. If you don’t do these things, you don’t deserve to be middle class. You don’t deserve to call yourself an American.
While there has always been economic inequality and those who have more and those who have less, we’ve called it a dictatorship, aristocracy, theocracy, oligarchy, maybe even capitalism. But the difference now is the assumption, even the expectation that the accessibility and availability of finance and information technology is automatically democratizing, blasting away discriminations against BIPOC and women. This new fintech reality has reshaped what it means to be an American, what it means to be a good citizen, in its own image. This book identifies these new implicit requirements for being a fine, upstanding, and contributing member of society and how we push back against these commonly held beliefs that keep the good life for some and an uncertain life for the rest.
