Jean Beaman

Jean Beaman will focus on two projects while in residence at CASBS. First, is a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Suspect Citizenship, which is an ethnographic examination of anti-racist mobilization and activism against police violence towards ethnoracial minorities in France. She considers the ways that the specter of state violence renders certain populations forever marginal or suspect and therefore incapable of ever being included in mainstream society. She further demonstrates the limitations of full societal inclusion for France’s non-white denizens and how French Republicanism continues to mark, rather than erase, racial and ethnic distinctions. Secondly, she will work on another book manuscript providing a critical perspective on racism and colorblindness in a global context. Beaman is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and has previously held visiting fellowships at Duke University, the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), and University of Notre Dame. She has conducted research on international migration, race, and racism in France (and the rest of Western Europe) and the United States. She is the author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017). She is also an associate editor of the journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and a corresponding editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques. She was the Co-PI for the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar grant, “Race, Precarity, and Privilege: Migration in a Global Context” for 2020-22. For more information about Beaman, visit : https://www.soc.ucsb.edu/people/jean-beaman