Sm Rodriguez

S.M. Rodriguez is a scholar-activist whose research interests center identity-based criminalization and transnational, transformative justice movements. They are the author of The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Uganda (2019) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Audre Lorde Project in New York City, USA.

Their current work considers the contemporary penal abolitionist movements occurring to eliminate or transform punitive institutions worldwide. Find more information on upcoming and recent lectures below, as well as research and publications on the next tab.

SM Rodriguez joined the Department of Gender Studies as Assistant Professor of Gender, Rights and Human Rights in September 2021. Prior to this appointment, they were based in New York, USA, as Assistant Professor of Critical Criminology in the Department of Sociology and Director of LGBTQ+ Studies at Hofstra University. They also previously lectured in Sociology and Africana Studies at Stony Brook University and State University of New York – Old Westbury.

Broadly speaking, my research shows a concern for sex, racialisation and punishment. I take an anti-carceral, Black and trans feminist approach to interrogate sex as a projection unto the body and as an activity, especially as related to criminal law and “correctional” practices. I have navigated this line of questioning in global and transnational research, with particular attention to African Diasporic people and places.

My current research focuses on penal abolition as a global social movement. I look at the development of and practices that form transformative justice, with particular focus on the role of queer people of colour at the grassroots and scholar-activists in higher educational institutions. My in-progress monograph, Abolition in the Academy: The Role of Academia in the Growing Movement for Penal Abolition, relies on interviews of abolitionists in seven countries. In it, I explain how scholars develop and disseminate the abolitionist imagination. The AAUW American Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020-21) has recently supported my book writing.

In my first monograph, The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Uganda (2019), I analyse the effects of transnational advocacy on Ugandan LGBTI (kuchu) organising during the four-year period in which the Ugandan government considered the “Kill the Gays Bill”. I situate kuchu activism in the simultaneous navigation of domestic, anti-gay criminalisation and global inequalities reinforced by international human rights apparatuses. From my interviews of human rights organisations that funded initiatives in Uganda, I located crucial, counter-productive racial narratives that ascribed lower value to human rights work offered by “locals”. Additionally, I found the rapid factionalisation of human rights organising at the grassroots due to newfound, financially-inspired communal mistrust. Ultimately, I present case studies of queer, Africana campaigns that put forward healing, transformative alternatives to repair the unintended harms of state-based and human rights campaigning. The Economies of Queer Inclusion received an American Sociological Association Distinguished Book Award Honorable Mention (2021) and was funded by national and regional organisations.

Expertise Details

Transnational Social Movements; Penal Abolition; Sexual Politics; Queer Theory; Crip of Color Critique; Disability Justice; Human Rights; State Violence; Transformative Justice

Publications

• Sexualities: Identities, behaviors, and society MS Kimmel, R Kalish, A Kennedy, C Llewellyn, B Coston, H Rademacher, ... US Higher Education-Sociology 74 2014
• Homophobic Nationalism: The Development of Sodomy Legislation in Uganda SM Rodriguez comparative sociology 16 (3), 393-421 6 2017
• Carceral protectionism and the perpetually (in) vulnerable SM Rodriguez, L Ben-Moshe, H Rakes Criminology & Criminal Justice 20 (5), 537-550 5 2020
• The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Uganda SM Rodriguez Rowman & Littlefield 3 2019
• Understanding Contemporary Africa PJ Schraeder Lynne Rienner Publishers, Incorporated 1 2020
• NOT BEHIND BARS SM Rodriguez, B Clark Contesting Carceral Logic: Towards Abolitionist Futures 2021
• The brilliance of BLM. An interview with Dr. SM Rodriguez M Abraham, SM Rodriguez Global Dialogue 11 (1) 2021
• Queer abolitionist alternatives to criminalising hate violence SM Rodriguez The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition, 190-200 2021
• Queers against corrective development: LGBTSTGNC anti-violence organizing in gentrifying times SM Rodriguez GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2021
• racialization. spectacle. liberation SM Rodriguez, C Sneed Wagadu: Transnational Journal of Women’s and Gender Studies 2021
• Feminist and Queer Theory: An Intersectional and Transnational Reader LA Saraswati, BL Shaw Oxford University Press 2021
• LGBTIQ rights M Epprecht, SN Nyeck, SM Rodriguez Lynne Rienner Publishers 2020
• Invisibility matters: queer African organizing and visibility management in a transnational age SM Rodriguez Oxford University Press 2020
• Challenging Perspectives on Street-Based Sex Work SM Rodriguez Contemporary Sociology 47 (6), 715-717 2018
• At the Juncture of Homonationalism and Homophobic Nationalism: Sexual Justice Organizing in Uganda and the Paradox of Transnational Advocacy SM Rodriguez State University of New York at Stony Brook 2016
• Academic Position SM Rodriguez University of Florida, Gainesville 2010
• Not behind bars: The rippling of carceral habitus and corrective violence on the family and community life of prison guards SM Rodriguez, B Clark Contesting Carceral Logic, 50-64
  
• Grants, Fellowships, and Awards T Banerjee, H Girma, C Llewellyn, V Lynn, K Pierce, M Restivo, ...