David Stein

Postdoctoral Fellow

David Stein received his PhD from University of Southern California’s Department of American Studies and Ethnicity in 2014. Trained in interdisciplinary methods, he is a historian whose work focuses on the interconnection between social movements and political economic relations in post-1865 U.S. history. His fields of interest include African American Studies, history of capitalism, working-class and labor history, policing and imprisonment, Urban Studies, and feminist and heterodox economics. He is currently working on his book manuscript, Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The End of Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State, which focuses on the politics and economics of unemployment from 1929-1979. The project details the efforts of Black freedom movement organizers to create governmental guarantees to a job or income, and how such efforts were stifled. He co-edited Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex (2008), and his scholarship has appeared in Working U.S.A.: The Journal of Labor and Society; Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order; and Lateral.. He co-hosts and produces Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast with Betsy Beasley.

Participating Years

2015–2016

Dialectics of Autonomy and Dependence

Self-determination had a heady run in the 20th century, instanced by both revolutionary assertion and homogenizing mimicry. But what is autonomy now? What is dependence? How are these conditions of existence necessarily related – as contradictory rather than contrasting ideologies, representations, relations, outcomes? What forms reveal the dialectic at work? What forms disguise or displace the dynamic?

2014–2015

After Debt: New Forms of Dependency, Obligation, Risk, and Credit

‘After Debt’ imagines a world beyond debt and pursues it as a research agenda across a broad range of intellectual inquiry. How have economic failures been transformed into personal identities, often dividing those deemed “at risk” from those capable of assuming risk? How might we understand histories of debt within genealogies of the fiscal military nation-state? What alternate meanings of dependency, obligation, risk, and credit have people produced within and against debt regimes, such as those enforced by structural adjustment?