Ainsley LeSure (Ph.D., University of Chicago, Political Science, 2015) is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science. She specializes in political theory with a particular focus on the critical theory of race and racism, phenomenology, democratic theory, and feminist theory. Her research is published in Political Theory.
Her current book project, Locating Racism in the World, develops a phenomenological theory of antiblack racism as a reality-violating racial common sense. She argues that we are better able to identify racism and intervene on it as an issue if our attention shifts from the individual's unconscious to the way racism unfolds as a phenomenon in the world.
The three payoffs of a worldly account of racism are a clearer pathway toward individual and institutional accountability, a clear mandate for a participatory, deliberative democracy to address racism’s reality defying tendencies through world-building that establishes and protects reality; and finally, an account of the common good of a racially just society as reality itself. The book offers novel and unexpected interpretations of canonical political theory and black studies texts: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power, and Hannah Arendt’s work on racism.
