About Ashley

Ashley Dawson is currently Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He currently works in the fields of environmental humanities and postcolonial ecocriticism. He is the author of three recent books relating to these fields: People’s Power (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities (Verso, 2017) and Extinction (O/R, 2016). 

Other areas of interest of his include the experience and literature of migration, including movement from colonial and postcolonial nations to the former imperial center (Britain in particular), and from rural areas to mega-cities of the global South such as Lagos and Mumbai. 

Ashley’s Writing

Teaching

For the past twenty years, Ashley has been engaged with public higher education in the US, first at the University of Iowa and then at the City University of New York (CUNY). As our nation’s largest urban university, CUNY helps transform the lives of huge numbers of students from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds. Ashley believes deeply in the mission of public institutions such as CUNY to provide a quality education to such students, and his teaching and pedagogy philosophy has been shaped by this commitment.

Selected Classes

This seminar will explore contemporary processes of – and resistance to – capitalist and neocolonialist enclosure. Our conversations will be oriented around a few key theoretical and political interventions. The first is the assertion that enclosure and extraction pertain not just to material things like land and minerals but also to relatively immaterial social resources such as information, culture, and even affect. The commons is thus a social form that is constantly created and recreated. The corollary of this, and the second key theoretical hypothesis of the seminar, is the idea that the commons is not solely a thing but a social practice. The commons, in other words, is the space of social relation created in and through acts of mutual aid and solidarity.

Course Syllabus

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Some keywords?

Activism

Ashley is the founder of the Mellon-funded Climate Action Lab (CAL) at the City University of New York, where he worked alongside a team of twenty graduate students and researchers from CUNY and other regional institutions to examine and fortify grassroots climate adaptation efforts in NYC. CAL does not work in isolation but rather builds bridges through collaboration with members of other organizations such as Decolonize This Place and WE ACT to articulate struggles for abolition, de-gentrification, and Indigenous rights to climate justice in NYC and beyond. Under Ashley’s leadership, the CAL team collaborated with urban planner Aurash Khawarzad, organizer of an influential climate adaptation plan for Upper Manhattan, to develop an empirical analysis of the compound crises that threaten residents of the city subjected to overlapping forms of economic and social disenfranchisement. The Climate Action Lab subsequently published a set of key constituent principles for a city-wide people’s climate planning process that have helped shape current struggles for a Green New Deal in the city. At present Ashley is a member of the Public Power campaign in New York.

Ashley’s Speaking

Writing

See Ashley’s published books, articles and blog posts.

Writing