Jennifer Tucker, PhD, speaker
Outlaw Capital shows how transgressive economies and gray spaces are central to globalized capitalism. With an ethnography of the largest contraband economy in the Americas running through Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, Outlaw Capital shows how conflicts over everyday illegalities shape urban development. By studying the differential treatment of “elite illegalities” and the “street illegalities” of street vendors, Outlaw Capital shows how racialized narratives of economic legitimacy across scales—not legal compliance—sort whose activities count as formal and legal and whose are targeted for reform or expulsion. Ultimately, reforms criminalized the popular economy while legalizing, protecting, and “whitening” elite illegalities.
Professor Tucker is an Associate Professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of New Mexico. Her research explores how places and practices construed as informal, illegal or lawless buttress networks of elite power and produce different kinds of urban spaces. Influenced by more than two decades of social movement activism, Professor Tucker’s research begins from the premise that ordinary people have the capacity to understand and transform the conditions of their existence; indeed, communities are always engaged in life-making projects of survival and transformation. To this end, her research includes the knowledge and lived experiences of marginalized communities as part of building transformative social theory.
Supported by the Leonard F. Heumann Fund and Lewis B. Wetmore Endowment