Books by Jodi Rios
Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed ... more Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policymakers, and the general public continue to frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved solely through legal, political, or economic means. Jodi Rios argues that the historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of our society and certainly foundational to the construction and experience of metropolitan space. She also considers how an ethics of lived blackness―living fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase―can create a powerful counter point to blackness-as-risk.
Reviews of Black Lives and Spatial Matters by Jodi Rios
Urban Geography, 42:2, 259-261, , 2021
View related articles View Crossmark data discusses briefly how local government can play a key r... more View related articles View Crossmark data discusses briefly how local government can play a key role in supporting community initiatives and "translate concerns from local stakeholders into food system planning"). The book has a strong empirical basis and favors situated knowledge. Some of the chapters' authors do not only write from the perspective of academia but also from that of their direct involvement in alternative food initiatives, which produces lively and in-depth accounts of food initiatives. These empirical accounts are linked to theoretical debates; in particular, the relation between degrowth and other concepts (care, sustainability, and the circular economy) is thoroughly analyzed, shedding light on the commonalities and points of contrast across those terms. Finally, the book does not ignore the inherent contradictions and tensions of the degrowth movement; the ambivalent role of technology in degrowth networks (Chapter 10), the availability of land for re-localized food systems (Chapter 15), the challenge of addressing colonial legacies (Chapter 2), and the tension between radical and reformist action to transform food systems (Chapter 12) are all tackled explicitly. Both accessible and thought-provoking, this book will be of interest to urban geographers interested in degrowth, how degrowth can shape cities and urban-rural relations, and the governance of urban transformations more broadly.
Journal of the American Planning Association, 2021
American Anthropologist , 2020
The suburbs of St. Louis held the nation's attention in the summer of 2014 after police in Fergus... more The suburbs of St. Louis held the nation's attention in the summer of 2014 after police in Ferguson murdered eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager who was confronted by the police for "walking while Black." Jodi Rios's Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St.Louis provides readers with a granular and historical perspective on the regional political economy and racist policing tactics employed in Northern St. Louis County suburbs where Blackness is calculated simultaneously as risk and resistance to predatory policing and enacts Black living as a method of freedom making. Rios's investigation spans postwar suburbanization, the role of school-district funding, and localized tax structures in solidifying racially fractured and desperately funded education districts that act as predeterminants for supposed criminality of Black youth and the neighborhoods where they reside. "Blackness-as-risk" carries two meanings for Rios. First, Blackness is perceived by governing and carceral forces as a risk to law and order and alone is justification for citing and criminalizing the homes and social and reproductive practices of Black residents who are repeatedly subjected to interactions with police and law enforcement. Second is Rios's assessment that law enforcement's predatory tickets and fines (re)produce Black residents' fungibility by constructing a citation-to-jail pipeline while generating funding for policing budgets spanning unincorporated municipalities that "view poor Black residents as ATM machines" (p.1). Selected interviews featured in the text display governmental justification for predatory policing practices; as stated by an alderperson of Pagedale, fines and citations are "the teaching we have.. .to teach people how to live" (p. 135). Rios examines how the region's small majority-Black municipalities, codified by suburban respectability, insert discourses of property rights, risk, and propriety borrowed from larger cities within local laws to extract revenue and discipline Black residents.
Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Review, 2020
In Black Lives and Spatial Matters, Jodi Rios provides an in-depth look into the practices of pre... more In Black Lives and Spatial Matters, Jodi Rios provides an in-depth look into the practices of predatory policing, blackness as risk, and blackness as freedom within North St. Louis County. This book, while published after Ferguson, is not a direct result of the unrest there. Rather, Rios provides an analysis and articulation of the history of North St. Louis County that preceded the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and a discussion of the mobilization and
Papers by Jodi Rios
Kalfou, May 12, 2016
<p class=&... more <p class="p1">Much has been written in various media outlets regarding the causes of, meanings of, and, to some extent, solutions to events in Ferguson. Also debated is whether or not a genuine social movement is emerging, what form it is taking, and if it can be sustained as places like New York, Cleveland, and Baltimore take Ferguson’s place on the front page. While much of this work assumes the Ferguson Protest Movement and the now more widely known Black Lives Matter movement to be one and the same, a closer look suggests that the Ferguson protestors maintain organizational and political distinctions unique to this particular group and place. With this in mind, it is important to consider two questions. What was specifically different about the death of Michael Brown and the place in which he lived and died, such that this event sparked sustained protests around the world? And what is different about the core group of protestors that emerged from the events in Ferguson, Missouri?</p><p class="p2">This essay considers a potential paradigm shift in the struggle against the well-honed logics of racialization in the United States and offers a little hope toward the future. As leaders of the early protests in Ferguson would later describe, the need to place their bodies directly on the front lines of the militarized police action initially rose as a response to the spectral flesh of Michael Brown’s body and had as much to do with pushing back against the historical disciplining of their bodies in space—as bodies out of place—as it did with protesting yet another police officer abusing deadly force. This was the critical factor that sparked another kind of flesh in the street in the form of the Ferguson Protest Movement. This intentionally orchestrated spectacle—of unapologetic Black life and flesh—in turn breathed new life into a fledgling movement that simply insisted that <em>Black lives matter</em>.</p>
Cornell University Press eBooks, Aug 15, 2020
This book is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policym... more This book is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policymakers, and the general public continue to frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved solely through legal, political, or economic means. This book argues that the historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of our society and certainly foundational to the construction and experience of metropolitan space. The book also considers how an ethics of lived blackness—living fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase—can create a powerful counter point to blackness-as-risk. Using a transdisciplinary methodology, the book studies cultural, institutional, and spatial politics of race in North St. Louis County, Missouri, as a set of practices that are intimately connected to each other and to global histories of race and race-making. As such, it adds important insight into the racialization of metropolitan space and people in the United States. The arguments presented in the book draw from fifteen years of engaged research in North St. Louis County and rely on multiple disciplinary perspectives and local knowledge in order to study relationships between interconnected practices and phenomena.
Cornell University Press eBooks, Aug 15, 2020
This chapter highlights some of the moments and patterns that are illustrative of the particulari... more This chapter highlights some of the moments and patterns that are illustrative of the particularities and peculiarities of the St. Louis region and are therefore important for understanding North St. Louis County. In many ways, the history of St. Louis in the latter part of the twentieth century closely follows the histories of most cities in the rust belt of the United States—in terms of de jure and de facto segregation in housing, education, and the labor force, as well as histories of suburbanization, discriminatory lending, and white flight. Moreover, the genealogies outlined in the chapter reflect the interconnected global histories of chattel slavery, colonial and imperial expansion, and capitalist development. In keeping with these histories, Black residents in the suburbs of North St. Louis County are disciplined as less-than-human, profit-generating bodies by tiny cities that have been stripped of resources and struggle to provide basic services except for an ever-expanding police force. A fierce desire for self-governance and municipal autonomy, a persistent tradition of parochial hierarchies, a peculiar reliance on the local courts, and the perpetual conflation of blackness and risk are legacies that result in specific forms of cultural politics and racialized practices across a highly fragmented geography.
Cornell University Press eBooks, Aug 15, 2020
This chapter examines the discursive regimes—the making and unmaking of truth—upon which cultural... more This chapter examines the discursive regimes—the making and unmaking of truth—upon which cultural politics in North St. Louis County relies. The cultural politics of space deploys culture as a regulatory discourse to produce spatial imaginaries and social meanings that explain disparity as a “natural consequence” of inferior Black culture. Using a discursively produced cultural politics of suburban citizenship and capitalizing on expectations of suffering in spaces qualified as urban, leaders, administrators, and judges police residents. An emphasis on “good suburban citizens” is clearly part of the politics of truth used by leaders in North St. Louis County to justify state violence. Antiblackness, which is historically dependent on a dialectical construct of civilization and its other, is thus embedded in a localized understanding of citizenship and the terms for belonging. Modern interpretations of good citizenship based on capital accumulation further set the terms for good suburban subjects as functions of self-reliance and consumption that reinforce a self-perpetuating cycle of capitalism. This results in complex and nuanced relationships of race, space, and power that cannot be reduced to simplified readings of economic rationalism, identity politics, or racial imbalances in the police force.
Cornell University Press eBooks, Aug 15, 2020
This chapter uses a framework of queer theory to argue that the particular aesthetic and affect o... more This chapter uses a framework of queer theory to argue that the particular aesthetic and affect of resistance in North St. Louis County made visible the extreme violence of the state in addition to exposing the inherent contradictions within masculine and heteronormative spaces of Black struggle. This is a critical component of queer of color critique. Similar to an Afro-pessimistic perspective of blackness, which locates Black life as a site of ontological death, the chapter argues that “the problem posed by blackness” is an antagonism rooted in the historically naturalized logics of society, including physical space, and is not a conflict that can be rectified through legal means. Through a more optimistic lens, it also highlights the various ways Black women and gender nonconforming individuals practiced a choreopolitics—of bodies in space—that demanded the terms of visibility be set by those “in view.” This particular practice of visibility and an insistence on simply living as an act of protest illustrate the capacity and power that Black lives and life hold in revealing the truth and thus reconfiguring the metrics of living as fully human.
Oxford Bibliographies, 2023
African American experience and policing practices in the United States are mutually determined a... more African American experience and policing practices in the United States are mutually determined and historically dependent—it is not possible to think of one without the other. For this reason, it is not surprising that at the time of this writing, thirty-five articles found within the Oxford Bibliographies subject area of African American Studies cite works that focus on issues of policing, and many more cover overlapping topics with those in this bibliography. While much of what is written about policing is concerned with formal practices—the people in blue, the informal policing of blackness operates at all levels of everyday life. This policing, writ large, relies on the coupling of blackness with risk and the decoupling of blackness from centuries-honed categories of “the human,” in order to produce and maintain structures of power. The interdependency between policing and antiblack violence therefore exists far beyond varying definitions of police brutality or excessive uses of force waged against nonwhite subjects. To frame solutions to “policing problems” as a matter of purging “racist cops” or instituting better training is, in and of itself, an act of violence. This frame obscures the fact that the formal and informal policing of blackness persists in doing exactly what it was always designed to do—to produce, protect, and privilege the prevailing order of society. This policing is further mediated by class and identity, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and citizenship.
Winterthur Portfolio, Dec 1, 2021
Law & Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice, 2019
In the suburbs of North St. Louis County, Black residents are
disciplined and policed for revenue... more In the suburbs of North St. Louis County, Black residents are
disciplined and policed for revenue to fund small struggling cities.
To put it in the way many residents do, municipalities view poor
Black residents as ‘ATMs,’ to which they return time and again
through multiple forms of predatory policing and juridical practices.
As part of this system and to hold onto the coveted yet hollow prize
of local autonomy, both Black and White leaders across this region
invest mightily in the ‘White spatial imaginary’ of the suburbs by
adopting a rhetoric of producing good citizens, promoting safety,
and upholding norms of so-called respectability. Narrated through
questions of citizenship, security, risk, and responsibility, the
double bind of the Black body means Black residents both suffer
from, and pay for, the loss of economic and political viability brought
about when they simply occupy space. As a result, Black leaders in
North St. Louis County oversee a racial state of municipal
governance that relies on centuries-honed tropes of Black deviance
and the illegibility of Black suffering. Based on archival research,
extensive surveys and interviews, and analyses of court and public
records, this Article looks at how desperate municipal governments
in North St. Louis County use cultural politics and multiple forms
of violence to develop localized policing and juridical practices to
replace disappearing resources and revenue.
Kalfou, 2016
This essay considers a potential paradigm shift in the struggle against well-honed logics of raci... more This essay considers a potential paradigm shift in the struggle against well-honed logics of racialization in the United States. My argument contends that the critical factor sparking sustained protest in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson was not the fact Brown was young, black, or unarmed. It was not where his hands were at the time Wilson fired his gun. Nor was it Brown’s contested identity as common thug or aspiring college student. The critical factor was not even that the leadership of Ferguson had long been practicing and defending a form of racially determined policing-for-profit on the backs of its Black citizens. The spectral flesh of Michael Brown’s body, which critically represented the historical disciplining of blackness and death of black bodies, linked spectral violence and trauma across space and time. As a result, protesters claimed the spectrality of 'flesh in the street,' pushing critiques beyond police-involved shootings and centering blackness--as a construction maintained for exploitation and as a practice of freedom.
The Page Avenue health impact assessment (HIA) was focused on a redevelopment in Missouri. This
... more The Page Avenue health impact assessment (HIA) was focused on a redevelopment in Missouri. This
case study describes a comprehensive HIA led by an interdisciplinary academic team with community
partners, as well as compliance with North American HIA Practice Standards. Some of the key lessons
learned included: (1) interdisciplinary teams are valuable but they require flexibility and organization;
(2) engaging community stakeholders and decision-makers prior to, during, and following the HIA is
critical to a successful HIA; and (3) HIA teams should not be too closely affiliated with decision-makers.
It is hoped that this case study will inform future HIAs.
Book Chapters by Jodi Rios
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Books by Jodi Rios
Reviews of Black Lives and Spatial Matters by Jodi Rios
Papers by Jodi Rios
disciplined and policed for revenue to fund small struggling cities.
To put it in the way many residents do, municipalities view poor
Black residents as ‘ATMs,’ to which they return time and again
through multiple forms of predatory policing and juridical practices.
As part of this system and to hold onto the coveted yet hollow prize
of local autonomy, both Black and White leaders across this region
invest mightily in the ‘White spatial imaginary’ of the suburbs by
adopting a rhetoric of producing good citizens, promoting safety,
and upholding norms of so-called respectability. Narrated through
questions of citizenship, security, risk, and responsibility, the
double bind of the Black body means Black residents both suffer
from, and pay for, the loss of economic and political viability brought
about when they simply occupy space. As a result, Black leaders in
North St. Louis County oversee a racial state of municipal
governance that relies on centuries-honed tropes of Black deviance
and the illegibility of Black suffering. Based on archival research,
extensive surveys and interviews, and analyses of court and public
records, this Article looks at how desperate municipal governments
in North St. Louis County use cultural politics and multiple forms
of violence to develop localized policing and juridical practices to
replace disappearing resources and revenue.
case study describes a comprehensive HIA led by an interdisciplinary academic team with community
partners, as well as compliance with North American HIA Practice Standards. Some of the key lessons
learned included: (1) interdisciplinary teams are valuable but they require flexibility and organization;
(2) engaging community stakeholders and decision-makers prior to, during, and following the HIA is
critical to a successful HIA; and (3) HIA teams should not be too closely affiliated with decision-makers.
It is hoped that this case study will inform future HIAs.
Book Chapters by Jodi Rios
disciplined and policed for revenue to fund small struggling cities.
To put it in the way many residents do, municipalities view poor
Black residents as ‘ATMs,’ to which they return time and again
through multiple forms of predatory policing and juridical practices.
As part of this system and to hold onto the coveted yet hollow prize
of local autonomy, both Black and White leaders across this region
invest mightily in the ‘White spatial imaginary’ of the suburbs by
adopting a rhetoric of producing good citizens, promoting safety,
and upholding norms of so-called respectability. Narrated through
questions of citizenship, security, risk, and responsibility, the
double bind of the Black body means Black residents both suffer
from, and pay for, the loss of economic and political viability brought
about when they simply occupy space. As a result, Black leaders in
North St. Louis County oversee a racial state of municipal
governance that relies on centuries-honed tropes of Black deviance
and the illegibility of Black suffering. Based on archival research,
extensive surveys and interviews, and analyses of court and public
records, this Article looks at how desperate municipal governments
in North St. Louis County use cultural politics and multiple forms
of violence to develop localized policing and juridical practices to
replace disappearing resources and revenue.
case study describes a comprehensive HIA led by an interdisciplinary academic team with community
partners, as well as compliance with North American HIA Practice Standards. Some of the key lessons
learned included: (1) interdisciplinary teams are valuable but they require flexibility and organization;
(2) engaging community stakeholders and decision-makers prior to, during, and following the HIA is
critical to a successful HIA; and (3) HIA teams should not be too closely affiliated with decision-makers.
It is hoped that this case study will inform future HIAs.
This chapter considers the power of racial and spatial categories to influence both institutional policy and everyday practice, looking specifically at the Normandy suburbs of St. Louis. Here, the stigmatized space of the ghetto intersects with valorized spaces of the suburbs resulting in unique practices of both subjugation and resistance. Important questions arise at this intersection, such as: How are bodies coded by space and space by bodies? How do historical biases toward race and gender play out differently in different metropolitan spaces and how do people use space to challenge and resist these biases?