
Tess Wise (she/they) is an Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They hold a PhD in Government from Harvard University and a BS in Political Science and Foreign Languages and Literatures from MIT. Their research centers on racialized political economy and seeks to put Critical Race Theory, racial capitalism, and anticolonial theory in dialogue with political science to study systemic racism and the global politics of accumulation through dispossession. Their book project, White Knuckling: Holding On in America’s Racialized Political Economy, uses ethnographic interviewing and historical analysis to explore how White middle-class Americans going through wage-earner bankruptcy are simultaneously advantaged and disadvantaged and how they make sense of their political-economic realities. Their new research project examines land grabs following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and how foreclosure and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are used as financial plantation technologies to benefit an enduring feudal-colonial elite. They are grateful for the space created by SASE for conservations, connections, and collaborations around the critical study of race and capitalism.