Séminaire LLEG. Stacey Sutton, "Building Real Black Utopias"

Abstract: Amid the current conjunctural crisis, the solidarity economy movement is ascendant. In communities across the United States, people are prefiguring alternatives to capitalist economies and social relations by establishing worker cooperatives, de-commodifying land, and advocating for local, democratic and shared ownership of community assets. They also develop movement infrastructures to deepen, expand, and sustain the work. This study maps what I call Real Black Utopias in the United States, place-based, Black-centered, solidarity economy ecosystem formations fighting intersecting systems of oppression while building liberatory projects in the interstices of neoliberal capitalism.

Stacey Sutton is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy and directs the Solidarity Economy Research, Policy & Law project at UIC’s Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED). Prof. Sutton’s research, teaching, and community engagement focus on economic democracy, solidarity economies, prefigurative politics, racial justice, and disparate effects of place-based city policies. Prof. Sutton has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Urban Affairs, Economic Development Quarterly, and Urban Affairs Review, among others. She is the PI of a study analyzing the City of Chicago’s Community Wealth Building Initiative. She is also working on a multi-city study exploring infrastructures, ideologies, and practices of Black-centered grassroots-led solidarity economy ecosystems in 14 cities across the United States. She serves on the Boards of Directors of the New Economy Coalition, the Democracy at Work Institute, and of the Woods Fund Chicago.  Prof. Sutton received a joint PhD in Urban Planning & Policy and Sociology from Rutgers University, an MBA in Economics and Organizational Behavior from New York University, and a BA from Loyola College in Baltimore.