Postcolonial Spatialities with Camilla Hawthorne

For the next Postcolonial Spatialities workshop event this quarter, please join  Dr. Camilla Hawthorne from UC Santa Cruz.

About the Speaker

Camilla Hawthorne (UCSC; PhD UC Berkeley) is a critical human geographer and interdisciplinary social scientist broadly interested in the racial politics of migration and citizenship, inequality, social movements, and Black geographies. Her work engages critical human geography, diaspora, Black European studies, and postcolonial/feminist science and technology studies. She currently serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz and is a principal faculty member in UCSC's Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program, an affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center and the Legal Studies Program, and director of the Black Geographies Lab at UCSC. Her teaching is focused on race, immigration and citizenship; political economy; Black geographies; subjectivity and identity; and social theory.

Her monograph, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022) explores the politics of Blackness and citizenship in Italy. In this project, she examine the ways in which the Italian-born children of African immigrants have mobilized for a reform of Italian citizenship law in the context of the Eurozone economic crisis and the southern European refugee emergency. Based on multi-sited, mixed-methods research conducted in Italy over seven years, Contesting Race and Citizenship asks: what new forms of differentiation and exclusion are emerging in Black Italian activists' efforts to reformulate and expand Italian citizenship? This book represents one of the first ever in-depth studies of Black Italian political mobilizations in Italy.
 
Learn more about her work