Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa
About
Louise Seamster is an assistant professor of sociology at the university of iowa. She earned her PhD in Sociology at Duke University, an MA in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research, and a BA at Vassar College. She writes about racial politics and urban development, emergency financial management, debt, and the myth of racial progress. Her research centers on the interactive financial and symbolic factors reproducing racial inequality across multiple domains. She has published work in Contexts, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Currents, and Sociology Compass, and has work forthcoming in Sociological Theory and Du Bois Review. She has also co-edited five special issues on race, politics and inequality in Political Power and Social Theory, Critical Sociology, Humanity and Society, and American Behavioral Scientist.
Current Work:
Dr. Seamster is working on a book manuscript on the people, politics, stories and emotions propping up the “extraction machine” in Benton Harbor. Dr. Seamster is extending work on race and emergency management to Flint. This project, funded by the Joint Institute for Computational Studies), rendering a publicly accessible archive of emails related to the Flint Water Crisis into a searchable public dataset, to conduct a digital ethnography exploring how majority-white state agencies interacted with, avoided, and talked about Flint’s elected public officials and residents. Seamster is also working with a co-author, Danielle Purifoy, on research under the umbrella of “The Right to Infrastructure,” funded by from Columbia University’s Buell Center for Architecture, creating a theoretical framework on how black towns operate within a larger white space. A second line of research, much of it coauthored with Raphäel Charron-Chénier, examines racial disparities in debt and debt markets, including “predatory inclusion” in student debt and the different meaning of debt for blacks and whites—an emergent finding from the disparate treatment of black cities’ debt. Finally, Seamster has published two articles coauthored with Victor Ray, arguing claims of racial progress rest upon untenable teleological assumptions.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Race, urban politics, debt, racial progress, development
