Jordanna Matlon Associate Professor Global Inquiry
- Degrees
- PhD, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
MA, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
BA, Urban Studies, Columbia University - Bio
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Dr. Matlon is an urban sociologist and scholar of race and colonial legacies in Africa and the African diaspora. Her scholarship interrogates the ways “Blackness” operates as a signifier, intersects with gender norms, manifests in popular culture, and illuminates our understanding of political economy. Her book, A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism (Cornell University Press) investigates the relationship between masculinity, work, and globalization in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. A Man among Other Men has won twelve awards from five associations across four disciplines, including the American Sociological Association's 2024 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award and the International Studies Association's John Ruggie ISA 2024 Best Book Award, the most prestigious publication awards in those disciplines. It also received an honorable mention for the African Studies Association Best Book Prize.
Her new book, Blackness as Being: Black Survival in the Age of Climate Catastrophe (under contract, Polity Press), bridges literatures on surplus populations, climate change, and racial capitalism to theorize the possibilities and precariousness of species-survival in the Anthropocene. It offers Blackness as an analytic to think with the paradox of precarious possibility – of past and present modalities of survival and of futures alternatively devastating or liberatory.
Dr. Matlon's work appears in American Sociological Review, Antipode, Poetics, Ethnography, Contexts, and the Black Scholar, among other places.
Dr. Matlon is the recipient of the 2024 SIS Faculty Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Research, Creative Activity and the 2022 SIS William Cromwell Award for Outstanding Teaching.
Prior to joining SIS, Dr. Matlon was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), France, and was a visiting fellow at IAST during the 2023-2024 academic year.
- See Also
- For the Media
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Teaching
Fall 2024
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SISU-340 Topics in Global Inequalty/Dev: Anthropocene/Crises Capitalism
Spring 2025
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SIS-804 Soc Theory Comp & Int'l Persp
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SISU-397 SIS Honors Colloquium: Race in World Political Econ