*New* Sarah Mayorga Shares Findings From Upcoming Book (2/27/25)

Posted: 2/21/2025 ()

On Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025 from 12 – 2 pm, the Earl & Edna Stice Memorial Lectureship and Department of Sociology will host a talk by Sarah Mayorga (Brandeis University) in Savery 409. In this talk, Dr. Mayorga discusses findings from her forthcoming book, Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism. Based on interviews with 117 residents of two working-class neighborhoods in Cincinnati, Ohio, she describes and analyzes how residents make sense of their lives and neighborhoods.

Residents talked about neglect, trash, and security to interpret their neighborhood circumstances. They used these narratives, or urban specters, to explain the negative things happening in their neighborhoods, often obscuring the relations of racial capitalism that produced these conditions.

Mayorga overlays residents’ interpretations with an analysis of exploitation, dispossession, and dehumanization to identify how racial capitalist relations, such as underdevelopment, produce the everyday harm that residents reported.

Sarah is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the sociology of race and racism, urban neighborhoods, and Latinx migration. She earned her PhD from Duke University and previously held positions at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the University of Cincinnati.

Mayorga’s first book, “Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood” (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), won the 2015 American Sociological Association Latino/a Sociology Section’s Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award.