Building a model for community data justice

How do we develop research models that help build community power? By making sure that community members are active partners at multiple stages of the research process. This means communities must have: 1) the power to shape the questions we ask, 2) the power to shape our research process to make sure it is not simply extracting data for our own benefit, 3) the power to package results in a way that is useful to our partners.

I was lucky enough to share my approach for a new report from the Brookings Institution, Supporting a community-led data infrastructure to build local and equitable governance that advances policy. See the video below for a brief summary, yes I make an appearance.

The Crisis of Expendability: Pandemics, Global Supply Chains, and the Threats to Essential Workers.

I’m happy to share a panel that I participated in where scholars from the United States and Latin America discussed how the COVID-19 crisis has affected the Americas and how we can organize for social justice. Click on the video to hear my thoughts about organizing in the time of pandemic capitalism. I cover global supply chains, essential workers, and tracking technologies that are being used to surveil and deport immigrants. My talk is in English. Some of the other talks are in Spanish.

Catch Me On The "Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism" Podcast

JUAN DE LARA ON LOGISTICS AND URBAN SPACE

Amazon’s withdrawal from New York City has sparked big conversations about companies’ impact on urban space, but less attention has been paid to the fact that, as logistics companies, corporations like Amazon have a particular spatial impact. Juan De Lara discusses how the logistics economy has remade urban regions and racial politics since the 1980s.

Book Launch Event

Thanks to @ElleFersan

RT @ElleFersan: If you have not read his book: Inland Shift, you should. Kudos to Prof @JuanD for #InlandShiftCSII book launch! @JodyAVallejo moderates a panel of leaders in the field.
CC: @Prof_MPastor @CSII_USC @uscigmi @USCDornsife pic.twitter.com/MN1PFVmoeX

— CSII at USC (@CSII_USC) November 13, 2018

Book Launch Event

Inland Shift Book Launch

This should be a great event! Panelists include:

• Jody Agius Vallejo, USC Professor and Associate Director for the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration

• Abel Valenzuela, UCLA Professor of Chicano Studies and Director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

• Alfonso Gonzales, UC Riverside Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies

• Chris Tilly, UCLA Professor of Urban Planning

DATE AND TIME
Tue, November 13, 2018
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM PST

LOCATION
Ronald Tutor Campus Center, TCC 227
3607 Trousdale Parkway
Los Angeles, CA 90089

Demographics do not determine destiny. The future of Latinx politics.

An excerpt from Inland Shift. In the book I argue that social movement organizing and not just changing racial demographics will alter the direction of politics in Southern California:

"I want to debunk a prevalent notion that inland Southern California’s changing demographics will alter its political destiny. Changing demographics may provide fertile ground for change, but the work of cultivating and nourishing the seeds of change will require more. The types of changes I have outlined here require an intentional political strategy, not simply a transition from one racial political regime to another."

De Lara, Juan. Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Southern California (p. 164). University of California Press. 

My new book is now available on Kindle

You can order and download Inland Shift today. Available HERE

Book summary

The subprime crash of 2008 revealed a fragile, unjust, and unsustainable economy built on retail consumption, low-wage jobs, and fictitious capital. Economic crisis, finance capital, and global commodity chains transformed Southern California just as Latinxs and immigrants were turning California into a majority-nonwhite state. In Inland Shift, Juan D. De Lara uses the growth of Southern California’s logistics economy, which controls the movement of goods, to examine how modern capitalism was shaped by and helped to transform the region’s geographies of race and class. While logistics provided a roadmap for capital and the state to transform Southern California, it also created pockets of resistance among labor, community, and environmental groups who argued that commodity distribution exposed them to economic and environmental precarity.