Reconfiguring Civic Space and Community under Neoliberal Governance: An Ethnographic Study of Fresno, California

Over the past decade, social scientists have increasingly focused their research on the impact of neoliberal policies on the social, political, and material landscapes of urban areas. This research stream dovetails with critical race analyses of the carceral state. This project views all neoliberal policies spatially located, meaning that the local histories and actors as well as the contemporary power structures shape the trajectory of the shape and administrative enactment of policies. Our project asks, what can we learn through a close examination of a specific case? This multi-year historical and ethnographic project draws on this scholarship to understand how civic space and conceptions of community have been reconfigured. We track how elected officials and government agencies deploy moral reasoning about specific groups to forward exclusionary land use practices that reproduce expansive, spatialised race and income inequalities while obscuring this outcome. Law enforcement plays a central role in this obfuscation as they are tasked with the displacement of the observable evidence of social inequalities partially produced through city planning practices and rooted in deep histories of discrimination and oppression.