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Jordanna Matlon Assoc Professor SIS - Global Inquiry

Degrees
PhD, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
MA, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
BA, Urban Studies, Columbia University

Bio
Dr. Matlon is an urban sociologist interested in questions of race and belonging in Africa and the African diaspora, and the ways “Blackness” operates as a signifier, intersects with gender norms, manifests in popular culture, and illuminates our understanding of political economy. Her multiple award-winning book, "A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism" (Cornell University Press) investigates the relationship between masculinity, work, and globalization in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

Her new book, "Blackness as Being: Black Survival in the Age of Climate Catastrophe" (under contract, Polity Press), bridges literatures on surplus populations, climate change, and racial capitalism to theorize the possibilities and precariousness of species-survival in the Anthropocene. It offers Blackness as an analytic to think with the paradox of precarious possibility – of past and present modalities of survival and of futures alternatively devastating or liberatory.

Dr. Matlon's work appears in American Sociological Review, Antipode, Poetics, Ethnography, Contexts, and the Black Scholar, among other places.

Prior to joining SIS, Dr. Matlon was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), France. She will be a visiting fellow at IAST during the 2023-2024 academic year.
See Also
Personal Website
For the Media
To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.

Teaching

Fall 2024

  • SISU-340 Topics in Global Inequalty/Dev: Anthropocene/Crises Capitalism