CURRENTS: Mike Casiano (AMST) & Krista Johnson (Howard U)

Mike Casiano
Assistant Professor, American Studies, UMBC

Drawing on diverse texts, including local government reports, newsletters, newspaper articles, and social scientific and criminological literatures, Mike Casiano explores how the discipline of indigent populations, particularly itinerant laborers, the perpetually unemployed, and the so-called insane, came to articulate and justify the contours of municipal power in Baltimore. Specifically, he will draw from two manuscript chapters that analyze the management and expansion of the City Jail and the Bayview Almshouse: institutions whose flailing and slipshod administration provide insight into the similarly chaotic growth of the city during the period under review.

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Krista M. Johnson
Associate Professor, African Studies, Howard University
Spring 2021 Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow

Four decades apart, two African American professors based at Howard University traveled to segregated South Africa to conduct research on racism and Empire: Ralph Bunche in 1937 and Merze Tate in 1976. Both scholars recognized that apartheid and the system of racial segregation in South Africa was profoundly interconnected with the politics of the rest of the world in fundamental ways that have largely been overlooked by scholars of International Relations and South Africanist scholars. Krista Johnson aims to uncover, historicize, and contextualize Bunche and Tate’s theoretical thinking on race and the international system, and how their South Africa research was both informed by and informed their broader intellectual framework.