Inés Valdez, PhD

Vita

Inés Valdez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Ohio State University. She works on critical race theory, capitalism, and empire and has published in the American Political Science Review andPolitical Theory, among other outlets. She has received fellowships from the European University Institute, Princeton University Center for Human Values, the OSU Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows, and the Humboldt Stiftung, which is sponsoring her stay at the ZEPP. Her first bookTransnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft(Cambridge) was published in 2019 and received the Sussex International Theory Prize.

Research at the ZEPP

While at ZEPP, she is finishing her second book, tentatively titled Democracy and Empire: Labor, Migration, and the Reproduction of Western Capitalism.This manuscriptexplores varied archives and historical junctures to show that central concepts and practices of political theory are grounded in empire, i.e., that democratic logics retained and transformed imperial logics. Through close readings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, and Martin Luther King’s writings on race and capitalism, the manuscript takes the political theory of empire beyond its traditional focus on text and single-region foci to theorize the transnational, mobile, and ecological dimensions of empire, and to ground democratic politics and concepts in this field. In particular, the book scrutinizes concepts and practices of popular sovereignty, self-determination, social reproduction, and alienation from nature in the western world and traces their intimate connections to empire. In closing, the manuscript explores the possibilities of rethinking popular sovereignty and democracy in anti-imperial ways, a practice that requires anti-oligarchic solidarity among peoples worldwide.

Valdez continues to engage with Kant's political philosophy (presently considering his writings on character in relation to his account of race and his politics). She will present this work at the Ethics Talks on December 6th, 2021. In other ongoing work, Valdez explores the role of big data in expanding sovereign power and hardening territorial control despite the presence of significant political disagreement and reflects on the figure of "the law" in the immigration debate, particularly its transformation into a technical device not subject to contestation.