Andy Clarno
Professor
Coordinator of the Policing in Chicago Research Group
Black Studies
Sociology
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Contact
- Building & Room:
- 4125 BSB
- Address:
- 1007 W Harrison Street
- Office Phone:
- (312) 996-5904
Email:
Research Interests
Racism, Capitalism, Colonialism, Empire, Policing, Comparative Racial Formation, Global and Transnational Sociology, Urban Sociology, Political Sociology
About
Andy Clarno is an interdisciplinary, community-engaged scholar whose work addresses racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperial policing. His research focuses on three central questions: How does global capitalism combine with racial, colonial, and imperial projects to differentially value human lives and labor in the early 21st century? What are the latest technologies deployed to protect the powerful by surveilling and policing working-class communities of color? And how are targeted communities building counter-carceral movements to resist surveillance and protect themselves while working toward collective liberation?
Clarno conducts research in support of campaigns led by social movements and transformative justice organizations. Through the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG), he has studied gang databases, predictive analytics, fusion centers, suspicious activity reports, and data-sharing mechanisms. This research culminated in the collectively authored book Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), which examines high-tech surveillance and data-sharing by local police, federal immigration authorities, and national security agencies in Chicago and offers a global lens on the abolition of imperial policing. Public reports generated by these research teams include Tracked and Targeted, Expansive and Focused Surveillance, Accountability After Abolition, Suspicious Activity Reports and the Surveillance State, and We Gotta Stop Criminalizin’ Mental Illness.
His first book, Neoliberal Apartheid (University of Chicago Press, 2017), traces the shifting dynamics of racial capitalism and settler colonialism in South Africa and Palestine/Israel after 1994. The book explains why the political-economic transitions that began in the 1990s generated similar social and economic conditions in South Africa and Palestine—including deepening inequality, concentrations of racialized poverty, and advanced forms of militarized policing—despite vastly different political trajectories. Neoliberal Apartheid received two book awards from the American Sociological Association.
Selected Publications
“The Praxis of Azmi Bishara: Envisioning and Building Toward the Liberation of Palestine.” In International Politics (April 2024).
“The Context of Struggle: Racial Capitalism and Political Praxis in South Africa” with Salim Vally in Racial and Ethnic Studies (Online November 2022).
“From Graduate Seminar to Activist Research Collective” in Radical History Review (May 2020).
“Neoliberal Colonization in the West Bank” in Social Problems (August 2018).
“Rethinking Our Definition of Apartheid” with Haidar Eid in Al-Shabaka (August 2017).
“The Thorns that Exist and Resist: Black-Palestine Solidarity in the 21st Century” in Middle East Report (Winter 2017).
“Rescaling White Space in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg” in Antipode (November 2013).
Education
PhD Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2009
MA Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2004
Advanced Arabic for Research, Institut Français d'Etudes Arabes de Damas (IFEAD), Damascus, Syria, 2002
BA Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas, Austin, Summa Cum Laude, 1997