When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and the Political Construction of Crisis and Non-Crisis
The language of crisis is ubiquitous in American politics. When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People works to denaturalize and analyze the deeply naturalized politics of crisis as a way to conceptualize the relationship between episodic hard times typically marked as “crises,” and the ongoing and quotidian hard times that routinely affect and structure the lived experiences of marginalized groups, particularly those whose marginality is constituted at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. I begin by exploring the political life of crisis as a keyword over the course of the 20th century. I then compare the ways in which dominant media and political actors addressed the “foreclosure crisis” of the early twenty-first century, juxtaposing this against what I call the “foreclosure non-crisis” of the late-1990s – a period during which subprime lending was proliferating and in which foreclosure rates were higher among people of colour and unmarried women they would be among whites and male-breadwinner households during what would come to be labelled a crisis a decade later. Together, these cases illustrate some of the ways in which the very notion of crisis relies on assumptions and practices that reflect, reproduce, and reconstitute prevailing attitudes and normative expectations about racialized and gendered inequalities.
[lunch will be available]
Dara Z. Strolovitch (Ph.D. Political Science, Yale) is Associate Professor at Princeton University, where she holds appointments in Gender and Sexuality Studies, African American Studies, American Studies, and the Department of Politics. Prior to joining the faculty at Princeton, she was Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her teaching and research focus on interest groups and social movements, political representation, the causes, constructions, and consequences of marginalization and oppression, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality in an American polity marked by enduring, overlapping, and structural inequalities. Her book, Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics addressed these issues through an examination of the ways in which advocates for women, people of colour, and low-income people represent intersectionally marginalized subgroups of their constituencies. Affirmative Advocacy won the American Political Science Association’s Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book on U.S. national policy, the APSA’s Political Organizations and Parties section’s Leon Epstein Award, the American Sociological Association’s Race, Gender, and Class section’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, and the Association for Research on Nonprofits and Voluntary Action’s Virginia Hodgkinson Prize.
Her work has appeared in edited volumes and in journals including the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, the American Journal of Sociology, the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, Social Science Quarterly, American Behavioral Scientist, Politics & Gender, the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, the Du Bois Review, and Politics, Groups, & Identities. She co-edited the CQ Guide to Interest Groups and Lobbying, was a founding Associate Editor of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity Politics, a member of the founding Editorial Boards of the Journal of Interest Groups & Advocacy and of Politics, Groups & Identities, and she serves or has served on the editorial boards of Political Research Quarterly, Politics & Gender, Perspectives on Politics, and the Journal of Politics. In 2016, she was co-recipient of the Mansbridge Award, given by the National Women’s Caucus for Political Science “on special occasions to extraordinary individuals who perform service above and beyond the call of duty on behalf of the WCPS and to advance opportunities for women in general,” and she received the 2018 Outstanding Career Award from the Midwest Political Science Association Women’s Caucus, awarded to “a senior woman in the discipline who has made a substantial contribution to the scholarship of political science, who has made significant contributions to the profession and its associations, who has actively mentored women at her own institution or elsewhere, and who serves as a positive role model for women in the profession.”
She has received grant support from sources including the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the American Political Science Association, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, has held fellowships at the Brookings Institution, Georgetown University, the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Study, and Russell Sage Foundation, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She is spending this year as a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, where she is completing her current book project, When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People, which examines the political construction of crisis and non-crisis and their implications for marginalized groups. Strolovitch received her B.A. in Political Science (with a minor in Women’s Studies) from Vassar College and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University.
Event sponsored by WGSS and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund
