Laurel Mei Turbin

Student Fellow

Laurel Mei Turbin is a doctoral candidate in Geography earning a certificate in American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. For her dissertation research, she is gathering community narratives of militarization in Wai’anae, a rural and heavily militarized area of Hawai’i. Her work examines the intersections of state-sanctioned racial violence, settler colonialism, and environmental racism through developing an ethnography of Indigenous cosmologies and other placemaking discourses and practices. Prior to her studies at the Graduate Center, she earned her Masters in Public Health at Columbia University, and has worked with New York City community organizations including CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities and WE ACT for Environmental Justice.

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?