CSRPC Directory: 2007-2008 Resident Fellows

Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, Postdoctoral Fellow

John Eason is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago whose interests include urban sociology, sociology of punishment, social control, race/ethnicity, and social change. He is a native of Evanston, Illinois receiving a B.A. in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1995 and a M.P.P. from the Irving B. Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago in 2002. Before entering graduate school, John worked as a church-based community organizer around criminal justice issues. He also served as a political organizer most notably for Illinois State Senator Barack Obama. In his dissertation John argues the prison town is a lens to understand how punishment links racial and economic inequality in and boundaries of the prison town he queries the probability of siting a prison based on rural town demographics and regional characteristic. Using a multi-method approach, he is completing research on a prison town case study posing two research questions. 1.) Given the history of stigma associated with prisons, how does a town collectively decide to accept one? 2.) How do prisons impact towns? Specifically, what is the political, cultural and social significance of a prison to a town that receives one? Economically, how are prison towns fairing compared to similar non-prison towns? While of theoretical interest for sociologists of punishment, prison town studies also have practical implications. Investigating the prison town can provide clarity as to why we have more than 2 million prisoners and 1,660 correctional facilities nationally. He also argues prison town studies can also aid policy makers in decisions regarding the expansion of corrections.

Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Arizona and a faculty affiliate in Mexican American Studies, Latin American Studies and the Department of English. She received her doctorate degree from Cornell University in English, with a graduate minor in Latina/o Studies in 2004. Beginning April of 2008, she will begin a William J. Fulbright Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Archivos Generales de la Nación and UNAM in Mexico City. In her words:
My work always hinges on questions of violence and the discursive. I have written about a number of topics under this rubric: cooking and epistemology, Latina/o popular culture and transnational capital, lynching and subjectivity, and saintly vitas as Chicana cultural allegories. I am an interdisciplinary scholar trained in cultural studies, drawing on a number of fields: women's studies, American studies, ethnic studies, literary studies and historiography. I have learned there is no single way to understand the relationship between race, gender, violence, sexuality and inequality. I am most interested in big questions: How does violence influence self and state conceived notions of citizenship? How is editing a text based on the gender, race, and class of an author an act of epistemic violence? What can a critique of Chicano nationalism reveal about the reproduction of racist, sexist, and homophobic discourses symptomatic of Chicano studies? How is Latina/o identity constructed with media discourses and transnational capitalist production? These are not just scholarly questions for me. They are personal issues that are dear to my heart and drive my commitment to diversity, scholarship and mentoring students of color. My biggest research priority at this time is my book manuscript, Unspeakable Violence: Narratives of Mourning, Citizenship and Loss in Chicana/o and U.S. Mexico National Imaginaries. While in residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, I am finishing a book that examines how Chicanas, Mexicanas and Indigenas have attempted to exercise their citizenship and maintain a sense of bodily integrity within the disciplinary structures of the nation, the family, and space. I examine five distinct episodes of violence against communities in the U.S./M éxico Borderlands: the 1851 Lynching of Josefa/Juanita in Downeyville California, the 1871 Camp Grant Indian Massacre in Arizona, gendered and sexualized violence in nineteenth-century South Texas (1840-1910), the Yaqui Indian Wars (1880-1910) in Arizona/Sonora and the Juarez Femicides (1995-present). My study examines how Chicanas, Mexicanas and Indigenas in these spaces have attempted to exercise their citizenship and maintain a sense of bodily and psychic integrity by contesting violations of their person. I argue that citizenship is based on several factors: universal and exclusionary notions of belonging to the nation state, and the complex processes of conditioning gendered, sexualized and racialized subjects to both police themselves and to understand that their existence is subject to policing by the state. Chicanas, Mexicanas and Indigenas are not viewed as full members of their respective communities and are thus more likely to be targets of physical, psychological, or discursive violence. My project reconstructs various violent episodes to explain the hegemonic rationales that simultaneously make these atrocities unspeakable for the victims of violence, and allow nation-states to perpetuate dominant narratives of national amnesia. I am delighted to be a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Race, Politics and Culture. This fall I will teach a course, "U.S./Third World Feminisms" that examines the most influential works by those women of color whose political and cultural investments in a collaborative, cross-cultural critique of U.S. imperialism and heteronormativity that has been called US Third World Feminism. Overall, I am deeply committed to serving students and enacting political and social change through education. So when you see me around the CSRPC, ask me about the complicated racial and social histories of the Salinas Valley and its lettuce industry and the U.S Mexico Borderlands during the 19th century and I will do my best to explain why we need a Latino/a Studies framework, grounded in Feminist theory that looks at instances of violence as complex and central to the formations of identities, nations and cultures

Bakari Kitwana is a journalist, activist and political analyst whose commentary on politics and youth culture have been seen on the CNN, FOX News (the O'Reilly Factor), C-Span, PBS (The Tavis Smiley Show) and heard on NPR. His 2002 book The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture, which focuses on young Blacks born after the Civil Rights Movement, has been adopted as a course book in classrooms at over 100 colleges and universities. The Executive Director of Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop, which tours the nation conducting difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop generation, Kitwana published his first book, The Rap on Gangsta Rap, in 1994. Since then he's been the Editorial Director of Third World Press, Executive Editor of the Source — the nation's top-selling music magazine — and co-founder the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention, which brought over 4000 young people to Newark in 2004 to create and endorse a political agenda for the hip-hop generation. A consultant on hip-hop for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Kitwana is currently Artist in Residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, where he teaches a course entitled "The Politics of the Hip-Hop Generation." An active writer, he's written a column on hip-hop for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and his essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Savoy and the Progressive. For the last decade, he has lectured and given keynote presentations at the nation's leading colleges and universities, including Princeton University, Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of California — Berkeley, Columbia University and countless others across the country. A native of Long Island, NY, he holds a B.A. and two Masters degrees (in English and Teaching) from the University of Rochester. Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop (Basic Books, 2005) is his most recent book.

Kafi Morange: I am a M.S.W. candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign specializing in Advocacy, Leadership and Social Change, with interests in issues of urban social policy reform, social change, and negotiations of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality in communities of color. I am from Chicago and received my B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from Vassar College in 2006. I spent my summer doing research in Santiniketan (West Bengal) at Rabindranath Tagore's Visva Bharati School of Social Work. In addition to taking courses at the university I volunteered at an orphanage headed by the grandson of Tagore, and Amar Kuti, a non-profit rural development organization focused on community empowerment and organizational sustainability. My work at Amar Kuti looked at the influence of micro credit on local organizations, the vital role of women in organizational sustainability and the development of community empowerment strategies. Ideally I plan on making connections between the community empowerment strategies being employed in West Bengal to those presently occurring in the African American community, revisiting the Civil Rights Movement's connection to Indian social movements. My short-term academic goals include advancing my knowledge of statistical research and acquiring a more sophisticated understanding of the field of Social Work in my six-month M.S.W. field placement at the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. I am currently aiding Dr. Waldo Johnson with research for the Chicago Community Trust's Black Male Initiative.