The ILR Undergraduate Research Fellows Program provides ILR undergraduates with the opportunity to work with a professor during academic year 2024-2025. This program was developed in response to numerous requests we have received from undergraduates for research opportunities and in the hope that it will facilitate one-on-one student/faculty interactions. Students participating in this program will receive an hourly pay of $17 per hour for up to 10 hours a week. Awards will be made on a one semester basis with renewal possible for the second semester. Students may not earn credit for the research project during the semester or year they are being paid as a research assistant. 

Estate Logics and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism

The term “estate” applies to large feudal landholdings in Britain, colonial-era plantations from the Caribbean to South Asia, and postwar and neoliberal housing projects. Each of these is a space constructed for regulating the productive and reproductive lives of marginalized people—enslaved and indentured workers, tenant farmers, and a racialized urban underclass. Making and remaking estates, then, is a project of making a home for capital. This project unpacks the entangled histories of landed country homes, plantations, and postwar social housing. It also charts the estate’s meandering career from Britain across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, to South Asia, and back again to the UK to explore how layered histories of home, work, and racialized oppression shape the landscape of the welfare state and its afterlife. 

Students working on this project will conduct a review of scholarly literature on the estate. This will involve basic research in the online library catalog, requesting books from the library, identifying arguments and empirical evidence, and collating these materials in basic computer database programs. Students should outline their familiarity with library research in their application materials. – with Professor Sarah Besky.

To apply for this Fall 2024 research opportunity, please click Apply below.