Jovan Lewis

Geography - Assistant Professor

Office:
597 McCone Hall

PH.D., LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
Economic geography, constructions and infrastructures of poverty, inequality, race (blackness), economy, and the market; the Caribbean (esp. Jamaica) and African-American communities

I am an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the co-chair of the Economic Disparities Research Cluster at Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (HIFIS). I received my Ph.D. in Anthropology from the London School of Economics.

My research examines race through the economic ethics, rationalizations, and practices that organize the lived experience of poverty and inequality in the Caribbean and the United States. My work in Jamaica, where I researched what I called the “sufferation” economy, explored the social practices and cultural forms that facilitate the locating, reconciling, and normalizing of structural economic and social inequality through local market frames. My current research in Tulsa, Oklahoma is concerned with the structural and infrastructural frictions of poverty.

Across these various geographies, my interests remain situated within the landscape of adverse economic circumstances, at scales ranging from the ethical to the global, especially when the adversity is the result of racial inequality, or a more structural economic deficiency or failure. I am especially interested in how race frames the experiences of those challenges and how a lack of resources is reconciled through attempts to rectify or simply cope with its absence. This theme runs through my published work, as well as my current book project, provisionally titled, Reparative Circuits: Crime, Capital and Postcolonial Connection in Jamaica. Reparative Circuits examines how disadvantaged black youth in Jamaica engaged in the practice of international “lottery scamming” mobilize a reparative logic of seizure in utilizing the development apparatuses of internet communication technology, customer service procedures, and money transfer services, to secure economic and social mobility.