Melanie E. L. Bush

Visiting Scholar

Melanie E. L. Bush, (Anthropology, 2002) is the author of Everyday Forms of Whiteness: Understanding Race in a “Post-Racial” World, 2011 Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (second edition), and a variety of other publications. She is co-author with Roderick D. Bush of Tensions in the American Dream: Rhetoric, Reverie or Reality? (forthcoming 2014 / Temple University Press). She is an Associate Professor in Anthropology/Sociology at Adelphi University; and has been active for many years in the struggle for justice and social change.

Participating Years

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?