Research

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  My book manuscript tentatively titled, Wards of Action: Emancipatory Visions of the Future and Social Change in Newark, New Jersey, 1840-2023 examines how Black Americans’ emotional reactions to racial violence, as manifested by individual leaders in their organizing work, contribute to shaping emancipatory visions of an anti-racist future.  Using archival and ethnographic methods, this manuscript demonstrates how Black grassroots leaders in Newark have used their reactions to racial violence to structure national mobilizations for the abolition of slavery from 1840 to 1850, antilynching legislation from 1922 to 1930, and resistance to urban renewal from 1966 to 1980. Though implementing any of these emancipatory visions of the future is often constrained by racialized structures of power, the community discourse they engender about the definition of freedom, personhood, and citizenship helped Black Newarkers to visualize and seriously consider previously unforeseen courses of action. Illuminating these possibilities reinforces Black agency by strengthening a positive sense of self, community, and place. 

Book Manuscript in Progress

Dos Santos, Karolina M. "Wards of Action: Emancipatory visions of the future and social change in Newark, New Jersey, 1967-1980" (In Progress)

Image Source: Newark Public Library
 

My second stream of research applies Du Boisian sociological methods to examine Puerto Rican racialized subjectivity and anti-colonial social movements. Through a case study of social movements for Puerto Rican sovereignty in Newark, New Jersey and Vieques, Puerto Rico, I demonstrate that emancipatory visions are both anti-racist and anti-colonial. I am in the process of developing a co-authored articles that traces how anti-colonial struggles in Vieques informed and emboldened social movements in Newark to resist the political, social, and economic confines of the color line in the continental United States from 1970 to 1980. 

For more information about my race and ethnicity research, see here.

Image Source: "El Boricua Newsletter," (1970) in Amilkar Vélez López papers at the Hispanic Resource Information Center, Newark Public Library

I combine my work on sociological theory and race to examine how Black Americans and Puerto Ricans negotiate their emancipatory visions of the future in relation to one another in urban America.  I argue that these different emancipatory visions of the future are influenced by how Black American and Puerto Rican individuals understand the American color line, and their place within it, and how these understandings transform as they move from South (Southern United States and the Global South) to North. The post-industrial city serves as the dynamic backdrop and historical context, or the "field," where these emancipatory visions of the future coexist and contend for dominance. I show that these emancipatory visions of the future both restructure and are structured by the constraints of the post-industrial city.

To read more about this work, see here. 

Image Source: Ironbound Community Corporation social mobilizations for environmental justice

 While historical sociology is conducive to examining the temporal dimensions of social life, critical archival methods are best suited to examining ideas, people, and neighborhoods that have been marginalized and, sometimes, completely erased from the historical record. My methodological intervention is to read the archive “against the grain” to examine how these emancipatory visions of the future are constructed and implemented throughout the lifecourse of a social movement (Hartman 1997). This method involves using any document produced by the state, legal entity, or organization and reading it for contrary purposes. This approach theorizes from the perspective of communities of color that have been displaced, whose knowledge has been misplaced within the archive, and whose collective action for self-determination has been buried under the historical record.