Dr. Sandra Harvey researches the production of race and gender through surveillance technologies originating in colonialism and chattel slavery. Her book manuscript, "Passing for Free, Passing for Sovereign: Blackness and the Formation of the Nation," traces narratives of race/gender passing within science, settler colonial law, conceptual art, and Enlightenment philosophy. It contextualizes accusations of race/gender passing in the U.S. as rooted in 19th-century surveillance of fugitive slaves and entangled in the above institutions which manage the state’s biopolitical concerns. In this way, she asks after the assumptions about blackness that emerge in the passing regime and how these might influence contemporary notions of freedom, sovereignty, the nation, and the citizen.
Dr. Harvey received her Ph.D. in Politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her research has been supported by the UC Consortium for Black Studies in California and the UCSC Center for Science and Justice.