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From South Central to the Global South: Racially Minoritized Youth, Transnational Processes, and Criminalization
Anibal Serrano, Dept of Political Science 

South Central Los Angeles is home to working-class Black and Latinx communities. Much of what has been written about South Central attends to its local dynamics. Yet, South Central provides an opportunity to think of the local in a national, and global context. The following questions animate parts of Serrano's work: How does South Central Los Angeles provide a window into understanding criminalization of Black and Latinx communities within the local, national, and global context? In what ways does a focus on South Central’s racially minoritized youth assist in delineating the transnational processes set in motion by the US? In this talk, Serrano will engage these questions and provide examples gathered from literature, observations and informal conversations with Black and Latinx youth, Serrano teases out transnational processes such as the war on drugs, war on crime, war on gangs, and the war on terror that impact South Central and the youth that reside within it. In so doing, Serrano argues that South Central, like other places, is a microcosm of foreign policies and transnational processes. Such policies and processes underline the local, national, and global impacts of racial capitalism and US empire-making.

Carceral Spells: Boundary-Making Through Mass Detention
Seyfullah Ozkurt, Dept of Political Science

How and why do states suddenly detain/incarcerate tens of thousands of people? My dissertation project investigates the political logic, legal framing, and algorithmic infrastructure of mass detention/incarceration events. Oxkurt conceptualizes these episodes as “carceral spells”—acute moments of political boundary redrawing that render specific populations presumed threats and justify their confinement through repressive but rationalized state practices.

Carceral spells rely on a confluence of factors that creates a particular securitization: 1) Political logics, such as the use of discourses of contagion or insurgency to justify mass repression; 2) legal frameworks, including emergency decrees and extralegal practices that enable administrative detention or detention without due process, and 3) data and algorithmic systems, which increasingly underpin systems of classification and targeting.

Through a comparison of recent cases of carceral spells—based on critical discourse analysis and interviews with those affected—Ozkurt plans to trace how these three dimensions interact across different cases. In this talk, Ozkurt will chart the universe of cases of carceral spells and flesh out the three factors through illustrations from two of the cases studied: the post-2016 repression in Turkey and the mass internment campaign in Xinjiang, China.

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