Serving UIC's Great Cities Commitment: Solutions for Today's Urban Challenges

Ronak K. Kapadia is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty in Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received a PhD in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University (2012), an MA in American Studies from NYU (2008), and a BA with honors and distinction in comparative ethnic studies from Stanford University (2005). Previously, he was the 2012-2013 University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside and the 2011-12 Riley Scholar-in-Residence in the Program in Race and Ethnic Studies at Colorado College.

A cultural theorist of race, sex, and empire in the late 20th and early 21st century United States, Kapadia is completing a book about the interface between contemporary visual media and US global counterinsurgency warfare in South Asia and the Middle East titled Insurgent Aesthetics: Race, Security, and the Sensorial Life of Empire (under contract, Duke University Press). With Katherine McKittrick and Simone Browne, he is co-editor of the forthcoming special issue of Surveillance and Society on race and surveillance, and his work also appears in Asian American Literary Review, South Asian Diaspora, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and edited volumes including: Shifting Borders: America and the Middle East/North Africa (Ed. Alex Lubin, American University of Beirut Press, 2014), Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016), and With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and US Empire (Ed. Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana, University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2017).

Kapadia’s research has been supported by the NYU Henry MacCracken Fellowship, the Mellon/ACLS Fellowship, the Consortium for Faculty Diversity in the Liberal Arts Colleges, the NYU Dean’s Dissertation Award, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, the UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy Faculty Fellowship, and the UIC Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholarship. Outside of academe, he is a former board member of FIERCE, a member-led community organizing working to build the leadership and power of queer and trans youth of color in New York City and Sage Community Health Collective, a worker-owned health and healing justice collective in Chicago.

Professor Kapadia’s faculty scholar project “Beyond ‘Chiraq’ and Homan Square: Alternatives to Mass Incarceration, Military Urbanism, and Homeland Security in Chicago”, asks how contemporary activists, artists, lawyers, and cultural producers have identified and challenged the growing links between mass incarceration, military urbanism, and homeland security in four key sites across Chicago. Specifically, Kapadia will analyze recent works by the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, We Charge Genocide, Project NIA, and Transformative Justice Law Project. As multi-issue, multi-generational political projects, these case studies will serve as the analytical grounds for his analysis of alternative strategies of resistance against the militarization of urban police violence and the broader domestic reverberations of the global war on terror. At stake here is the quality of life for this city’s most vulnerable inhabitants, primarily working-class people of color, racialized immigrants, and trans and gender non-conforming people who have come to be seen as a source of targets and threats that need to be continually tracked, scanned, warehoused, and controlled, if not entirely eliminated, in the name of security. By analyzing local and transnational forms of activism and cultural production, Kapadia argues for a new framework through which to understand the links between mass incarceration and the global war on terror. In the process, the project documents more critical and imaginative responses to US state violence as well as the alternative models of coalition and collectivity that these violent politics have engendered within multiple activist communities across Chicago.

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Amy Kate Bailey’s research is oriented around questions of racial inequality, with a historical line that focuses on racial violence, and a contemporary area that examines the role of the US military as a stratifying institution. Her recent work interrogates the relationship between community-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics and the rate of military enlistment. She has identified a typology of communities with differing levels of enlistment and explores the link between residential segregation and enlistment, and how that varies depending on the race of the enlistee. From a neoliberal perspective, the military as a major employer of working class adults, and key institutional mechanism for redistribution of public resources to “deserving” individuals.

Her faculty scholar project, “Transition to Adulthood for Working Class Youth: Institutions and Informal Practices in Local Communities”, extends this conceptual framework to examine enlistment in concert with competing institutional options available to young adults from working class backgrounds, and shifts the scope of her inquiry from nationally-focused comparative work to an in-depth examination of community-level institutional processes and normative social practices.

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David Stovall, Ph.D. is a Professor of Black Studies and Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His scholarship investigates four areas 1) Critical Race Theory, 2) concepts of social justice in education, 3) the relationship between housing and education, and 4) the relationship between schools and community stakeholders. In the attempt to bring theory to action, he has spent the last ten years working with community organizations and schools to develop curriculum that addresses issues of social justice. His current work has led him to become a member of the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School of Social Justice High School design team, which opened in the Fall of 2005. Furthering his work with communities, students, and teachers, Stovall is involved with youth-centered community organizations in Chicago, New York and the Bay Area. Currently, this work manifests itself in his involvement with the Chicago Grassroots Curriculum Taskforce (CGCT), a collection of classroom teachers, community members, students and university professors who engage in collaborative community projects centered in creating relevant curriculum. In addition to his duties and responsibilities as an associate professor at UIC, he also serves as a volunteer social studies teacher at the Great Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice.

Professor Stovall’s faculty scholar project, Engineered Conflict: School Closings, Public Housing, Law Enforcement and the Future of Black Life organizes legal jurisprudence theory, post-colonial theory and philosophy of race to interrogate state-sanctioned violence, urban space and the politics of exclusion. As a project slated for the Spring 2016 semester, the project draws attention to policy formation and implementation as ideological rationales for containment and marginalization. Because school closings, destruction of public housing and federal corruption statues are primarily investigated as singular entities, their grouping under the auspices of a planned instability provides a framework to examine conditions of urban space for African-American and Latin@ residents.

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