Rachael Stephens

I’m currently a doctoral student at UPenn in the Education, Culture, and Society program (GSE) and Department of Anthropology (SAS). My main interests are U.S. political economic inequity, social change (in relation to politicization, ideology, discourse, etc.), and social ethics. l am committed to trying to better understand--and more effectively transgress--the processes through which we learn to continually re-make our inequitable realities. I examine how many of us --particularly those who identify as "liberal"--learn to construct the "cause" of various social "ills" in ways that disavow our complicity in and responsibility for its "solutions." Put simply, I'm concerned with how many of us learn to think we are "not part of the problem." I also consider how normative social scientific knowledge production is itself grounded in a liberal paradigm that tends to reproduce more inequity than it interrupts. 

My dissertation will explore these dynamics as they are manifested in the concrete interactions that sustain the so-called "real estate market," property relations (including valuation and taxation), public finance (including school finance), and perhaps most especially, the public discourses that narrate such phenomena. This focus also allows me to consider contemporary technologies of social differentiation (particularly race-making and related taxonomies of citizenship) as they relate to the late liberal mode of production.


Future Research:
The primary motivation of my dissertation research is to illuminate the taken-for-granted, interactional work of producing Greater Hartford, Connecticut's inequitable distribution of property wealth—including the work of deflecting one’s complicity in those seemingly banal interactions—and to interrogate how such mundane practices relate to the broader reproduction and contestation of social inequities. I draw on insights from both historical materialism and material semiotics in order to uncover the ongoing, interactional processes of valuating and taxing real estate property. I am interested in how all Greater Hartford residents (and resident-researchers) are complicit in producing one of the most inequitable distributions of property value in the nation. This inequity has tremendous implications for individual life chances and also for the ‘everyday reproduction’ of capitalist relations writ large (Lefebvre 1974). As municipalities across the nation face tremendous cuts in federal funding, they increasing rely on property taxes to fund municipal services (including schooling). This often reinforces existing regional inequities, particularly in Connecticut – a state that relies more heavily on property taxes than almost any other state, that already has a more inequitable distribution of property value than any other state, and has increased property taxes to such a degree that it has solicited calls of a “Tax Armageddon.”  Connecticut’s inequities sit in perceived contradiction to the liberal ideals that characterize the largely “blue” state. As a recent Hartford Courant (Kahrl 2018) article inquired: how can an area defined by “liberal values” be plagued with such “exclusionary practices”? As Povinelli (2013) notes, citizens of the late liberal State are increasingly reluctant to recognize the violences of liberalism, let alone their own participation in said violences. This study aims to elucidate the ways that liberal ideologies and practices are predicated on a systemic erasure of everyday acts of violence, including the seemingly banal acts involved in valuing and taxing real estate. As a whole, this research will speak to the mundane processes of political economic development; socio-spatial segregation and race-making; and social ethics and citizenship in the late liberal era.

I will ask questions such as: How do various actors (e.g., real estate agents/developers, tax assessors, buyers/sellers) evaluate a given parcel of real estate, including the people and places with it is associated? What metrics do they use?  What are the “hierarchies of ascriptive difference” (Reed 2013)—including the racial categories—that they utilize? To what degree do these interactions encourage the naturalization of property value (so that it is perceived as a static entity derived from within the property, rather than a dynamic relationship of ascription), and the naturalization of the ascriptive categories with which these evaluations are conducted? Do these processes contribute to the general sentiment that the ongoing negotiation of property value is a relatively objective process? Does this contribute to the tendency to “deflect” the recognition that one is participating in these exclusionary processes? What do residents’ meta-narratives about property taxation say about how they imagine their relationships to one another, to the State, and to social inequality write large?