Explore the vast range of titles available.

America Recovered reveals the point where abstract political processes manifest themselves in the physical world, thus providing an alternate means of experiencing the contemporary American landscape. Collectively, the images and essays show what aspects of our everyday lives are being assigned value in the promise of a recovered America. America Recovered collects forty images that mark one of the only efforts to document the breadth of projects funded by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Unlike the New Deal and other programs designed for employment and infrastructural development, the Recovery Act was passed without any funds dedicated for photographic documentation. Using an official government website as his guide, Chad Ress took photographs of projects across the country. The publication of America Recovered at this moment allows for a critical reassessment of the Act and its lasting impact on the American landscape. The two essays by architectural writer Jordan H. Carver and photography historian Miriam Paeslack situate Ress's photographs within broader discourses of urbanism, infrastructure, and politics. The question of what role the government should play in everyday life remains one of the touchstone issues in American politics. The photographs and essays ask a different set of questions, not whether government spending is good or bad, whether it worked or didn't, but what, exactly does government spending look like. And importantly, America Recovered asks how government spending and civic identity are constructed around place.

The boundary between the United States and Mexico is many things. It is a geographic designation and real object of empirical study. It is home to people in the United States, Mexico, and dozens of Indigenous peoples. It is, as Rachel St. John says, “central to state projects of territorial sovereignty, economic development, and the construction of the boundaries of the body politic”. And like all borders, the discussion of the U.S.-Mexico border, as Étienne Balibar says, relates, precisely, to the establishment of identities, national or otherwise. Yet, for much of the population outside the border region, it exists, as a social imaginary and space of political contestation. It is a myth, an image, a symptom, a system, and a process. It is an accumulation of aspirations, technologies, fears, and architectures.This dissertation analyzes the longue durée of material accumulation of objects, architectures, and spatial strategies in the border region and how they mediate, through images and political discourses, the formation of racialized populations. By race, I understand the term as defined by Michael Omi and Howard Winant as “a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interest by referring to different type of human bodies”. I use their definition it positions conflict central to the logics of racial formation. Conflict and difference are also integral to the formation of the modern nation-state and, importantly, an understanding of whiteness as a racial identity under constant threat. I show race making in the borderlands as a social process that deciphers threat along racial lines and exploits the resources of the state to mark, maintain, and defend unequal racial hierarchies. In doing so, I question the normative understandings of state and individual sovereignty, national defense, and the role of architecture in producing national territory.The archive of material objects gathered here includes images, technologies, spatial strategies, and techniques of segregation and enclosure, all of which constitute an expansive definition of architecture. In looking precisely at the spatio-material logics of boundary creation and maintenance, I claim architecture, broadly defined, operates as a mediating technology that binds together the twin projects of American state formation and transnational racial subject formation. That is, through the construction of the boundary line and border region, architecture produces both the nation and a hierarchy of radicalized subjects. Importantly, I also claim the national-racial project cannot happen without spatio-material strategies. Architecture does not simply provide convenient objects to analyze a much-discussed topic. Architecture is a constitutional element in both making the state and its racialized subjects.