Justin Rogers-Cooper

Student Fellow

Justin Rogers-Cooper is a full-time instructor of English composition and literature at LaGuardia Community College and a PhD candidate in English and American studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His dissertation is entitled Revolutionary Emotions: Crowd Fictions and the Crisis of American Nationality, 1860-1935. It traces how American authors such as Martin R. Delany, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt presented the crowd as a critical agent of social change in a restricted democracy, particularly in situations of political and economic crisis. While the historical lens for the dissertation is transatlantic nineteenth and early twentieth century social psychology, the theoretical framework involves reconciling the politically excited crowd with contemporary scholarship on the affective turn, specifically within the philosophical trajectory of Baruch de Spinoza. His larger research interests involve the realist and naturalist novel, the cultural psychology of mass movements, the history and politics of fossil fuels, and ecological catastrophe. He has also taught at Kingsborough Community College, Queens College, and Skidmore College.

Participating Years

2010–2011

Labor/Crisis/Protest

Labor processes and conditions of employment in almost all sectors of the economy and most of the world have been revolutionized over the last thirty years. Generally, the share of wages in gross domestic product has declined while the share taken by capital (finance in particular) has soared. The response (or lack of it) to these new conditions has been patchy, raising questions of the state of political consciousness and political subjectivity among affected populations. Where, many ask, is the outrage and why the lack of mass protest and mass movement?