Public Talk / Christien Tompkins - ``Who Wants to Be Human Anyway?``: Design, Race, and Anti-Blackness in New Orleans' Privatized Education System

Christien Philmarc Tompkins is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and black studies scholar at Rutgers University New Brunswick. His work is broadly concerned with the critical ethnographic study of how technocratic interventions into inequality reproduce racialized governance in the United States. His forthcoming book (University of California Press), Reconstructing Race: New Orleans’ Education Experiment finds that New Orleans’ citywide experimentation with private management and education labor has led to the proliferation of novel topographies of racialized urban governance. In these sites, educators, policymakers, designers, and entrepreneurs reconfigure and mobilize race under emergent expert cultures which work to transform the exceptional violence and flat temporality of the immediate Post-Katrina reconstruction into normalized infrastructures and enduring futures. The city has long been held up as a site of experimentation with racial orders. Now, it is also positioned as an ideal locus for reflecting on reconstruction as a mode of racialized governance. Dr. Tompkins has been awarded the Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship to support this work. He has previously served as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at UCLA and earned his doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.