Collected Work

How to Break an Addiction: A Method-in-a-Manifesto for Quitting Capitalism

How To Break An Addiction paints an original and dynamic portrait of the nature of the opioid crisis while offering original commentary on what the crisis portends about the present historical conjuncture. Interrogating long- and short-run, macro and micro, national and global, structural and personal factors, it takes the ongoing US opioid crisis as a jumping off point to illustrate the profound conclusion: capitalism at its core is an addiction. In a blend of memoir, historical record, original research, and theoretical and cultural analysis, critical geographer and harm reduction activist Annie Spencer argues against a dominant ‘progressive’ presumption of the need to reform (or ‘save’) capitalism, demonstrating instead the imperative to think, organize, and enact new ways of being and provisioning together on a living Earth. How To Break An Addiction renders visible the extent to which the world we inhabit today is made by addiction—in capital’s image—and against life and well-being. Spencer calls for redress of the deepening crisis of addiction and the so-called ‘epidemic’ of pain at its root; for a paradigm shift away from the dominant economic logic in favor of new kinds of ecosystemic social practice and provision. We must innovate a new way of being human together in the here and now. Spencer’s first-person narration anchors rigorous and far-reaching research and theory, making for an original and impactful tour through capital’s addiction to crisis and our ability—and need—to break from it.

Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Spirals in the Caribbean responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called Spiralism, Sophie Maríñez explores in this book representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.

The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History

Drawing upon years of archival research and interviews with former students, professors, and administrators, Brian Jones provides an in-depth account of one of the most dynamic student movements in United States history. The book takes the reader through Tuskegee students’ process of transformation and intellectual awakening as they stepped off campus to make unique contributions to southern movements for democracy and civil rights in the 1960s.

“Homeless Shelters and the Blues”

This article analyzes the emergence of New York City’s infrastructure of homeless shelters dialectically, relationally, and historically. The members of Boogie Down Productions met in an incipient New York City homeless shelter in the mid-1980s. Their relationship and music is a window into a critical political consciousness of men living in homeless shelters because the artists gave expression to an emergent structure of feeling of resistance taking hold during intense changes to New York’s political economy and its institutions.

“Transportation Justice: From Civil Rights to the Right to the City”

This essay argues for a change of approach toward thinking through transportation equity, particularly in terms of the Right to the City. To see transit in these terms is to spend less time ferreting out the racists and more time challenging the political economy of cities themselves. As the legacy of the Montgomery bus boycott suggests, where the demand is for civil rights alone, we risk simply winning the front seat on a sinking ship. Instead, we might take a more radical tack and make more capacious anti-racist demands for robust public services.

Rights in Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California’s East Bay

Is public transportation a right? Should it be? For those reliant on public transit, the answer is invariably “yes” to both. Indeed, when city officials propose slashing service or raising fares, it is these riders who are often the first to appear at that officials’ door demanding their “right” to more service. This book starts from the presumption that such riders are justified. For those who lack other means of mobility, transit is a lifeline. It offers access to many of the entitlements we take as essential: food, employment, and democratic public life itself. Drawing on a detailed case study of the various struggles that have come to define public transportation in California’s East Bay, the book offers a direct challenge to contemporary scholarship on transportation equity.

“How Poor Public Transit Makes Idiots of Us All”

America’s mass transit systems are in a sorry state, and only a tiny minority of Americans makes use of them. For Kafui Attoh America’s transit is “idiotic” in two ways: in the sense that it is stupid to have not invested more in it, and in the way it isolates those unable to use cars, excluding them from urban public life.

“Remeasuring Stephen Jay Gould”

Fifteen years after his death, Stephen Jay Gould’s ideas have never been more vital. In this article, Matthew Lau outlines the progressive implications of Gould’s inventions in popular science, particularly his critique of biological determinism, his reckoning with the renewal of race science in the 1980s, and his background in antiracist organizing.