2020 Elections: Race, Youth, and the Impact of Covid-19

Tuesday, June 2, 2020, 12:00–1:00pm

Zoom

Cathy Cohen joins 3CT Co-Director Kaushik Sunder Rajan for a conversation on how COVID-19, the killing of George Floyd, and the uprisings over the last several days have drawn renewed attention to systemic racism and inequality in the United States.

Cohen will share insights from her work with GenForward and the Black Youth Project, including recent data about how young adults, in particular young adults of color, are thinking about political engagement ahead of the 2020 US elections. Sunder Rajan will consider the relationship between protest and representative electoral politics in the fight for social justice.

Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. She is the author of two books, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press) and Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press). Cohen created and oversees two major research and public-facing projects: the GenForward Survey and the Black Youth Project, and she was recently awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in support of this work.

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. His work lies at the intersection of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), with commitments to social theories of capitalism and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Pharmocracy: Value, Politics and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine (Duke University Press) and Biocapital: The Constitution of Post-Genomic Life (Duke University Press).