After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has been held up as a blank slate for the dreams of reformers and entrepreneurs of all stripes to reinvent schooling, housing, and cultural production, amongst other realms. The previous mayor, Mitch Landrieu, has stated that “New Orleans is the nation’s most immediate lab for innovation and change.” Others, like Naomi Klein, have cast the Post-Katrina transformation of the city in a more critical light, arguing that New Orleans has rather become a laboratory for racialized neoliberalism, gentrification, and segregation. How does an American city, especially one that has been posed as an exceptional space within the American landscape, become a laboratory and model for the rest of the country? Rather than use the term laboratory as merely a metaphor, praise, or epithet, this course asks students to critically examine how American cities come to be constituted as experimental spaces.
This course puts ethnographic and historical readings on select American cities in conversation with Science and Technology Studies in order to provide a basis for understanding how and when they become spaces for modeling, scaling, and replicating racial experiments. Students will be asked to answer questions like: what particular configurations of politics, histories, populations, and institutional forces qualify a city to be characterized as an experimental space and what knowledge practices circulate from these spaces? How is race not merely an effect of experiments with institutions like schools and housing, but a co-constituting force within them? The course readings open with theories of the experimental in STS before moving to explorations of the idea of America as an experimental project and the specific manifestations of racial experiments in New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco. Before each class, a student moderator will facilitate a public discussion on social media amongst students which will require concise reflections on the readings, links to relevant news stories, and direct responses to classmate contributions. The final assignment will be an empirical research paper (10-15 pages) in which students will argue for the characterization of a city not highlighted in the course as an experimental space, and how. Bridging ethnography, science studies, urban studies, and history, this course examines the experimental as a fundamental feature of racialization and asks students to critically examine how cities embody and transmit this modality.
About Professor Tompkins
Christien Tompkins is an anthropologist with research interests in critical race studies, black politics, education, labor, neoliberalism, the United States, urban studies, expertise, and design. His first book project, Reconstructing Race: New Orleans Education Reform as Experimental Labor (forthcoming, University of California Press), shows how charter school supporters and education reformers in Post-Katrina New Orleans came to develop sophisticated forms of racialized expertise in response to criticisms of their movement.