William Sites, PhD

William Sites’s scholarship focuses on different modes of community self-organization in response to historical contexts marked by deep urban inequality. Drawing from the fields of sociology, political science, urban studies and social welfare, one strand of this work addresses how economic and political structures, policymakers, and community-level actors shape the ways in which cities develop and change, along with the implications of those changes for the power and social welfare of urban residents. Centered on whether and how urban politics matters for working-class groups and communities of color, this research has examined such issues as conflicts over neighborhood gentrification, the evolution of urban development policy, and the impacts of the U.S. response to neoliberal globalization on social equity and community change in American cities.  His book-length study of these issues, focused on the transformation of New York City during the final quarter of the twentieth century, is titled Remaking New York: Primitive Globalization and the Politics of Urban Community (University of Minnesota Press). Other research in this area has examined the multiple traditions of community organizational practice in the United States, the politics of African American wage inequality, the “rescaling” of the U.S. immigrant rights movement, and the relation between urban justice movements and institutional politics in Chicago.  This research has been published in such journals as Sociological Theory, Urban Affairs Review, Politics & Society, Journal of Urban Affairs, Environment and Planning A, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.

A second strand of Professor Sites’s scholarship addresses “critical-utopian” conceptions of African American urban community as well as certain unconventional cultural activists who developed these ideas. Focusing on post-World War II Black Chicago as a site of musical and communal experimentation, his recent archival research explores how the Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra elaborated imaginative conceptions of cultural emancipation in response to city-within-the-city ideals of Black urban life – dreams of freedom as collective autonomy and self-determination that were inspired by early twentieth-century communities such as Black Birmingham and Chicago’s Bronzeville.  Drawing on insights from African American studies, musicology, urban geography and religious studies, this historical research traces the musical and social activities of Sun Ra and his colleagues as a form of community-based utopian activism in which cultural production becomes a way of reimagining the city and of enlisting audiences to entertain an open, transformative, Black-centered future.  Much of this research is presented in the book-length study, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and in articles published in the Journal of Urban History , Urban Geography, and American Studies.

Current research continues to focus on key issues in both these areas, including new elite strategies of urban redevelopment and fiscal governance as well as the challenges of re-historicizing U.S. community practices in relation to urban racial projects. The common thread in all this work is how various community actors attempt to (re)define themselves and their activism under changing conditions, along with the implications of these efforts for community practice, urban politics and expansive visions of social change.