Jennifer Ridgley

Postdoctoral Fellow

Jennifer Ridgley is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. Her current research explores the convergence between the management of migration and the criminal justice system in the United States, focusing on the restructuring of the U.S. Immigration Service during the late 1930s and early 1940s. A geographer and activist engaged with the politics of labor, citizenship, and social movements, her broader research interests include urban policing, law and geography, and border security. Her first book manuscript, Cities of Refuge: Citizenship, Legality, and Exception in U.S. Sanctuary Cities, documents the evolution of city sanctuary policies in the United States, highlighting the significance of the city as a site through which to understand the bordering practices of state institutions.

Participating Years

2011–2012

How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture

In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?

2010–2011

Labor/Crisis/Protest

Labor processes and conditions of employment in almost all sectors of the economy and most of the world have been revolutionized over the last thirty years. Generally, the share of wages in gross domestic product has declined while the share taken by capital (finance in particular) has soared. The response (or lack of it) to these new conditions has been patchy, raising questions of the state of political consciousness and political subjectivity among affected populations. Where, many ask, is the outrage and why the lack of mass protest and mass movement?