Laura Rivas

Student Fellow

Laura Rivas is a doctoral candidate in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation examines the impact of an insular culture of antislavery on the political territorialization of the Dominican state. Analyzing the tension between fugitivity and official rule, she considers historical practices of black flight into rural areas and the rearticulation of colonial ideas of progress in the postcolonial state to explain the fractured cartography and political instability of the early Dominican nation. Peasants’ autonomous lifestyle favored local forms of governance over a framework of national culture for the materialization of freedom and political rights. With the advent of the nation-state, revolutionary turmoil becomes a process through which peasants inserted themselves into a national project devised to either exclude or discipline them. Her research engages alternative articulations of sovereignty—in this historical setting and at different scales—that challenge the hegemonic, ethnonationalist variant at play in the Dominican Republic today.

Participating Years

2023–2024

The State. Abolitionist? Fascist? Communist? Bourgeois?

In imagining and forging the future, there is much talk of the state, but often with little detail. What should public goods consist of, and how might they be organized? Can the need for coercion (e.g., to pay taxes for public goods) be realized without the carceral and its underlying apparatuses of organized violence? What forms of sovereignty and its delegation (above or below) are possible and desirable?