Brian Sargent

I am a sociologist with a joint appointment in sociology and public policy that studies racialized governance with a particular focus on the management of urban spaces. I am interested in how racial logics structure ideas about “good governance” while simultaneously inhibiting the implementation of state antiracist interventions. This work puts me in conversation with scholars from a variety of fields, but my principle areas of interest include: race, organizations, urban sociology, economic and political sociology, and policy implementation. The aim of my work is to develop a set of conceptual tools for academics and activists alike to better interrogate the implementation of hard-fought political victories so that the policy outcomes better match their intentions.  

These interests broadly manifest in two projects. First, I am finishing a book manuscript that examines the Federal Reserve’s first decade attempting to implement the Community Reinvestment Act, an anti-redlining law passed in 1977. Here, I find that the Fed’s organizational identity was incapable of conforming to the type of governance that the CRA required. I highlight the power of the racialized governance lens by revealing an under-theorized bureaucratic process. This process, which I call policy foreclosure, was structured by racial logics that erased power relations and ultimately pushed the regulatory burden back onto the credit-deprived communities themselves. In order to study these phenomena, my colleagues and I developed an approach to historical methods that specializes in generating strong theoretical claims through archival research. This methods work has been published recently in Qualitative Sociology. 

My second book project, currently at the data collection stage, examines how late 19th and early 20th century reformists in the US and Canada leaned on tropes of Black and Indigenous peoples' inability to govern themselves to create and promote the academic and professional fields of public administration in general and urban planning in particular. I do this by focusing on their arguments for the need and importance of city managers and other classes of unelected bureaucrats with executive authority. My interests have also led me to study how legal monetary sanctions are used to segment and govern cities’ populations through housing, debt markets, voter disenfranchisement, and economic surveillance.