ADVANCING EQUITY AND INNOVATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Meet The Faculty for FI’s Fall 2024 Team-Taught Courses


Race and Caste


This course explores the meanings, uses, and politics of race and caste historically and in the contemporary moment. It asks how considering race and caste together can deepen our understanding of inequality and justice today. Learn more.

Co-Taught by Ajantha Subramanian (CUNY Graduate Center) and Shreya Subramani (John Jay College of Criminal Justice).

Dr. Ajantha Subramanian is a Professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her work addresses the historicity and political economy of caste. She is particularly interested in the incorporation of caste into projects of governance and capitalist transformation, and how these projects in turn have shaped the social relations of caste. Her work also considers caste as an instrument of classification and management that has been imagined and deployed in relation to other categories of class, religion, and race. Her first book, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India (Stanford University Press, 2009; Yoda Press, 2013), chronicles the struggles for resource rights by Catholic fishers on India’s southwestern coast, with a focus on how they have used spatial imaginaries and practices to constitute themselves as political subjects. Her second book, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), analyzes meritocracy as a terrain of caste struggle in India and its implications for democratic transformation.

Dr. Shreya Subramani is an Assistant Professor in the Law & Society Major. She specializes in Legal and Political Anthropology and Black Studies with a focus on the relations between racial inequality, carceral geographies, labor, and city life. Her recent research and current book project offer an ethnographic exploration of the emergent policy and programming infrastructures of prisoner reentry in New Orleans, Louisiana. Through this work, Subramani provides a historically grounded critique of progressive criminal justice reform as a reconfiguration of the racialized/racializing forces of carceral power and elaborates the political potentials of abolitionist praxis.

COALITION FORMATION IN URBAN POLITICS


This course uses New York City, in comparison with peer cities, as a laboratory for exploring the contours of racial-ethnic collaboration and competition in forming political and electoral majorities — and the implications they hold for how city government distributes benefits and regulates development. It will help seminar participants develop empirical skills in collecting and analyzing relevant data, as well as deepen their theoretical understanding of group identity formation, racial hierarchies, and inter-group cooperation and competition. Learn more.

Co-Taught by John Mollenkopf (CUNY Graduate Center) and Keena Lipsitz (Queens College).

Dr. John Mollenkopf teaches Political Science and Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, directs its Center for Urban Research, and chairs the public policy subfield in political science. His teaching and research interests focus on urban politics and public policy, using New York City as a case study in comparison with similar large cities in the U.S. and Europe to understand urban political mobilization, immigrant political incorporation, and the formation of governing coalitions. This work seeks to understand how urban policy decisions are made and what consequences they have for different groups and interests, particularly new immigrant groups. He has authored or edited eighteen books on these subjects, most recently Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration (Cornell University Press, 2016), co-edited with Manuel Pastor.

Dr. Keena Lipsitz is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of Competitive Elections and the American Voter (University of Pennsylvania, 2011) and a co-author of Campaigns and Elections: Rules, Reality, Strategy and Choice (W.W. Norton, 2012) and Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Participation and What We Can Do About It(Brookings Institution, 2005). She has also published numerous articles in the areas of political communication, political behavior, and democratic theory.

CONTACT US

The Futures Initiative
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016-4309

FOLLOW US