Territories of Exaction: Austerity, Bias, Dross investigates contemporary austerity and argues that this regulatory framework facilitates extraterritorial usury, environmental colonialism, and differentiated, unequal citizenship. Set within a genealogy of American colonial finance and racial liberalism, the book presents cases at diverse scales—including the territory of Puerto Rico and its capital San Juan, Jefferson County Alabama and its county seat Birmingham, and Camden New Jersey—and explores their governance of debt in relation to material waste, specifically water and sewer infrastructure and financing. The case studies track how neoliberal financial and environmental crises unfold within longer histories and political geographies of exaction and racial dispossession that mount punitive pressure on BIPOC communities today. Using anticolonial conceptual figures and allegory in a sequence of original images, the book integrates disparate accounts of crisis that redefine contemporary landscapes of colonial violence and extraction. The book shows how speculative design can galvanize public humanities engagement with municipal finance and debt.

Co-authored with C. Greig Crysler (University of California, Berkeley)

Associated Talks

2023, “Exaction: Territories of Austerity, Bias, Dross,” The Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Lecture Series “Public Stages: Architecture, Nature and Urban Cohabitation,” March 10

2022, “Exaction: Territories of Austerity, Bias, and Dross,” Goff Lecture Series, Gibbs College of Architecture, University of Oklahoma, March 25 (co-presenter C. Greig Crysler)