Yannick Coenders is a historical sociologist of race, space, and politics.
His research agenda interrogates how race persists and continues to shape the social life of populations on both sides of the Atlantic, despite the global decline of institutions that brought it into being, such as European colonialism, slavery, and de jure segregation. Coenders’ research has been published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Antipode, Public Culture, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
His current book project, Dispersal: Governing Against the Ghetto in Post-World War II Europe examines why, despite its long tradition of segregating and concentrating nonwhite people, opposition to concentration became increasingly central to urban race governance in Western European cities from the 1950s onward. Tracing the transnational circulation of discourses on “the ghetto” on the one hand and leveraging the rise of the first residential dispersal policies in the industrial cities and migration hubs of Birmingham in the UK and Rotterdam in the Netherlands in the early 1970s on the other hand, the book interrogates this historical break through an analysis of urban politics, policy formations, media discourse, and social-scientific knowledge production about race. Pivoting urban sociology towards a distinctive postcolonial perspective, Dispersal offers a sobering genealogy of contemporary liberal politics that celebrate racial diversity and spatial mixture in the context of urban renewal and gentrification in Western Europe. Moreover, it shows how anxieties about the US ghetto were a central motif justifying these various aims.