Collected Work
For over 25 years, the CPCP has convened scholars and organizers committed to producing knowledge for collective liberation. The writings collected here showcase the breadth, rigor, and political imagination of CPCP fellows’ work, from critical analysis to strategies for social change.
Filter by seminar theme to see work developed in that year and click “more” to access each piece.
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“Mobile Work: Handcart and Bicycle Workers Across the Urban Economy of Greater Accra Region”
This article explores the role of handcart and bicycle workers—mobile workers—in the urban economy of Accra and Tema, Ghana. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, it shows how their practices of food vending, e-waste collection and mobile trade exemplify a form of relational infrastructure that sustains urban life through improvisation, cooperation and mobility. By engaging AbdouMaliq Simone's concept of people as infrastructure and Milton Santos's theory of urban economic circuits, the paper highlights how these workers articulate local practices with broader flows of capital in African cities.
“Feeding the Enclave: Special Economic Zones, Street Food Vendors, and the Dynamics of Urban Economy in Tema, Ghana”
This article investigates the everyday interactions between highly capitalized firms operating within the Tema Free Zone (TFZ) in Ghana and low-capital street food vendors working in and around the enclave. Drawing on Milton Santos’s theory of the two circuits of the urban economy, it examines how industrial production and informal food vending are dialectically articulated – functionally interdependent yet structurally asymmetrical. While formal firms in the TFZ operate within export-oriented global circuits, popular food vendors sustain the daily reproduction of industrial labour by providing affordable meals and services under precarious conditions. Based on qualitative fieldwork (interviews and systematic observation), and cartographic documentation, the analysis highlights the vendors’ supply networks, spatial practices, and capacity to mobilize local and regional scales. The study demonstrates that SEZs are not isolated enclaves but hybrid and porous urban formations whose productivity depends on the everyday economies that surround them. By foregrounding these relational dynamics, the article contributes to a non-dualist understanding of urban economies, capturing the intertwined arrangements between economic actors that operate under different forms of organization, and access to capital, labour, and technology within the city.
“Pathé Baby Films of North Africa”
This essay argues the Pathé Baby home projector and its documentaries of North Africa reveal the apex of the nineteenth-century domestic dream and a twentieth-century nostalgic grasp of crumbling Empires. Moving images that were controlled by the projectionist, and which were flattened on the shell walls, emblematized the racialized time that trapped North Africans in a vague past on the screen. However, if the projection suggests that the colonized farm, weave, dance, within the colonizers’ home, the small but present ways, we find the North Africans rejecting the camera and/or performing exoticism for a financial exchange complicate the previously read passivity in their objectification, and thwart their inclusion in a colonial home collection.
“Treat It like a Seminar: Black Sonic Resistance to the Reagan Revolution”
Ronald Reagan’s landslide 1984 reelection isolated urban centers in the United States as sites of domestic resistance to Reagan’s ascendant conservative hegemony. Black (and Latine and queer White) artists and activists located in major cities who rejected (and were rejected by) the “Reagan Revolution” contested their symbolic erasure from the polity by establishing conceptual spaces—sonic, literary, organizational, and otherwise—where they might defy the assertions of US right-wing conservatism. Musicians Tracy Chapman and Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) of the hip-hop group Public Enemy exemplify the choice that some Black artists made to produce politicized art that sought to refute conservative rhetoric. Chapman and Chuck D mobilize a sonic counterpolitics of nostalgia that allowed them to connect the messages embedded in their music to sounds associated with important social movements from the recent past in order to resist the conservative politics that dominated the Black 1980s.
“Book Review: Mallika Shakya. 2018. Death of an Industry: The Cultural Politics of Garment Manufacturing during the Maoist Revolution in Nepal”
This review evaluates an important addition to the anthropology of industrial growth and decline in South Asia. Mallika Shakya's ethnography of the garment industry in Nepal is as much a close look at entrepreneurship, labor practices, and trade unions as it is a commentary on US trade policy, uneven development, and Maoist revolutionary politics.