U: Postcolonialism and Legacies of Empire

Julian Go

Julian Go‘s research explores the social logics, forms and impact of empires and colonialism; postcolonial/decolonial thought and related questions of social theory, epistemology, and knowledge; and global historical sociology. Much of Go’s work has focused on the US empire, resulting in articles and books such as The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (co-edited with Anne Foster, Duke University Press, 2003), American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (Duke University Press, 2008) and Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 to Present (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His other work is on postcolonial thought and social theory, culminating in his book Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, Oxford, 2016; and global historical sociology and transnational field theory: Fielding Transnationalism (co-edited with Monika Krause, Wiley & Sons, 2016) and Global Historical Sociology, co-edited with George Lawson (Cambridge, 2016). His most recent book, Policing Empires: Militarization and Race in Britain and America, 1829-present (Oxford, forthcoming) explores imperialism’s impact upon police militarization in the US and Britain. He is also working on a project that recovers anticolonial thought as a critical form of social theory. His scholarship has won prizes from the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, the American Political Science Association, and the International Studies Association, among other institutions. He is the winner of Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology given by the American Sociological Association. 

Johns Hopkins University

Zophia Edwards

Zophia Edwards is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Director of Black Studies at Providence College, RI, USA. Her research examines the impacts of colonialism and multiracial labor movements on state formation, state institutions, and long-term development in resource-rich countries in the Global South, with a particular focus on Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has been published in Sociological Quarterly, Studies in Comparative International Development, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Political Power and Social Theory, among others.

Johns Hopkins University

Alexandre White

Alexandre White joined the Johns Hopkins Faculty in 2019 after completing a Provost’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship here. He earned his B.A. in Black Studies from Amherst College, his MSc. in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his PhD  in Sociology from Boston University. He is also jointly affiliated with the Department of the History of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine and is an Associate Director for the Center For Medical Humanities and Social Medicine.

His work examines the social effects of infectious epidemic outbreaks in both historical and contemporary settings as well as the global mechanisms that produce responses to outbreak. His book project, Epidemic Colonialism: A Social History of International Disease Response, explores the historical roots of international responses to epidemic threats. This book will examine how certain epidemic outbreaks become “global threats”, that is, diseases that become the focus of international regulations and organized responses while others do not. To answer this question, this work draws upon archival data collected at the World Health Organization (WHO) archives in Geneva, the Western Cape Archives in Cape Town, the British Library, British National Archives, the Wellcome Library Archives in London, and twelve qualitative interviews with senior global health actors in order to analyze five cases when disease threats were prioritized internationally as well as how these constructions patterned responses to outbreaks. White begins by exploring the formation of the first international disease controls in the 19th century, the International Sanitary Conventions, created to prevent the spread of three diseases- plague, cholera and yellow fever. He probes how these earliest conventions patterned responses to diseases covered under them and limited responses to those beyond their scope. Examining how these conventions transformed, he explores why the same disease priorities were maintained by the WHO in their International Sanitary Regulations of the 1950’s. Finally, he analyzes the transformation of the International Health Regulations in 2005 and its effects on the assessment of disease threat. 

His published work in the field  has demonstrated how differences in the perceived threat of deadly diseases have provoked anomalous responses to outbreaks. Global Risks, Divergent Pandemics: Contrasting Responses To Bubonic Plague And Smallpox In 1901 Cape Town, in Social Science History explores two simultaneous epidemics that, despite similar pathologies, prompted significantly varying responses from public health actors in 1901 Cape Town: the bubonic plague and smallpox. His work in fields beyond medical sociology has primarily explored questions of racial subjectivities, anti-colonial revolution and uprising and structures of colonial domination and resistance.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jason Jackson

Jason Jackson is Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Jason’s research is broadly concerned with the relationship between states and markets in processes of social transformation. It assesses the implications of political struggles between business, government and societal actors over the structure of market institutions and resulting competitive and distributional outcomes. Jason is currently writing in three main areas: (1) the role of anti-colonial economic nationalism in development; (2) the rise of the digital platform economy and the future of work; and (3) the role of law in the governance of public health and the COVID-19 response.