About

Katharyne Mitchell is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current research focuses on the history and physical environment of spaces of containment, including forced labor camps, asylum holding centers, and deportation facilities. This work is funded through an Alexander von Humboldt research award. In recent work, she has explored the role of faith-based organizations in providing humanitarian aid and refuge to migrants. Her investigations include the transnational networking employed by church groups to protect asylum claimants, the policy impacts of church-based activism, and the shifting meanings and practices of sanctuary. She is based in the Department of Sociology at UCSC, located in Rachel Carson College.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology
• Political economy
• Art
• Development economics
• Economics
• Virology
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Displaced Lives

  2026-02-27

  book-chapterSenior author

  The chapter discusses ‘displaced lives’ in the prevailing European context. The perspective is of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants whose reasons for becoming displaced are manifold. The chapter begins with a discussion of displacement as a lived condition, introducing it as a forced, often agonising situation, but one in which people respond with varying degrees and forms of agency. It then considers the growing impact of climate change for increased mobility. Two vignettes from the authors’ recent and ongoing research follow, focusing on (in)visibility and emplacement, and squatting and time. The examples demonstrate how a cultural-geographic approach can contribute to understandings of contemporary displacement, by drawing attention to the uneven and differentiated experiences and the related practices of those most impacted by forced mobility, even as the structural conditions under which people act is underscored.

  PublisherDOI

• The Politics of Revenge: <i>Revanchist Populism</i> in San Francisco and the United States

  Antipode · 2025-06-03 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This article offers a conjunctural analysis of revanchism in San Francisco across scale. Over the past decade, conservative politicians, media, oligarchs, and organisations have emphasised immigration, homelessness, bureaucratic inefficiency, the opioid epidemic, diversity initiatives, and criminal justice reform to frame San Francisco as a weak and lawless city. This coalition's vengeful rhetoric and retaliatory action seek to create a new “common sense” about spatial governance, justifying a more authoritarian approach to both city and nation. Different scales are entwined as the discourse of urban decline is used as a national appeal, while nationalist rhetoric serves to promote urban reform. We argue this articulation of actors, forces, and ideas across scale represents an emergent historical bloc of revanchist populism . Moreover, our case study furthers the theory of urban revanchism by revealing the discursive deployment of the “failed” city in a broader hegemonic struggle.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Foreclosure, Disclosure, and Political Engagement

  Migration and Society · 2024-06-01

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Considering the increased institutionalization of scholar-activist research across many university contexts, this reflection critically engages the assumed harmony between scholarship and activism in migration research. Collaboratively authored by eight academics at various disciplinary, geographic, gendered/racialized, and career-level junctures, the article examines the commitments, aspirations, anxieties, and contradictions of activist scholarship. The reflection elaborates on concepts such as accompaniment, reciprocity, foreclosure, disclosure, and impact, putting a finer point on what responsible, ethical, and political research means in the neoliberal university today. The discussion develops insights from a 2023 workshop, convened by Noor Amr and Katharyne Mitchell, at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany.

  PublisherDOI

• Notes

  2024-04-18

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Epigraph: Gilmore, "Forgotten Places, " 35-36

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Philanthrocapitalism, Neoliberalism, and the University

  Human Geography · 2024-12-10 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Munger Hall, a planned dormitory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was expected to house 4500 students in a single structure, with 94% of their rooms windowless. Designed and partially funded by philanthropist Charlie Munger, Munger Hall is a classic illustration of the hubris and power of philanthropy in the twenty-first century. For many donors, new ways of thinking about the ills of society and the optimal implementation of philanthropic benevolence impact the direction of their philanthropy and the process of gift-giving itself. For example, the importance of directly controlling all aspects of the gift as well as leveraging funds, assessing a return on investment, and cultivating new subjects are key features of contemporary philanthropy. Acceptance of this type of philanthropic intervention has increased due to the neoliberalization of higher education, alongside precipitous declines in state funding. While much of the scholarship on philanthrocapitalism has addressed the social and organizational impacts of large gifts, we emphasize the spatiality of the process, showing how the actual physical spaces of buildings and other forms of institutional infrastructure are often implicated in philanthropic gifts, with potential effects on the experiences and subjectivities of users. In higher education, these types of experiential effects can have wide-ranging consequences, operating to direct students and faculty toward or away from certain kinds of research opportunities or into particular forms of collaborations and social relationships and away from others. This article investigates these recent trends with an in-depth examination of Munger Hall.

  PublisherDOI

• A Conjunctural Mapping of People’s Park

  Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2024-01-19 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Following calls to spatialize conjunctures, this article proposes and practices conjunctural mapping through a case study of the ongoing struggle at People's Park in Berkeley, California.Although the method of conjunctural analysis enables and requires an investigation into the multiple forces at work in the production of hegemony, such analyses tend to focus on cultural, economic, political, and social (or horizontal) dimensions of winning or contesting consent, without necessarily locating the formations of these expressions at different (vertical) scales.What is the role of the geographical in producing and countering hegemony, and how do we consider questions of scale in a conjunctural analysis?We offer an example through a conjunctural mapping of People's Park, where the University of California, Berkeley, and park defenders address pressures and seize opportunities at the scales of the subject, city, and state to respectively redevelop or protect the park.Mapping their multiple geographies reveals how the neoliberal crisis (in higher education, affordable housing, and public space) takes place and requires work at each scale in the struggle for hegemonic settlement.Spiraling outward and upward, cases like People's Park show that conjunctures are best analyzed through consideration of local complexities and scale articulations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Can Progress Toward Ending the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic in the United States Be Monitored?

  UNC Libraries · 2023-11-17

  articleOpen access

  The plan for Ending the HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) Epidemic (EHE) in the United States aims to reduce new infections by 75% by 2025 and by 90% by 2030. For EHE to be successful, it is important to accurately measure changes in numbers of new HIV infections after 5 and 10 years (to determine whether the EHE goals have been achieved) but also over shorter timescales (to monitor progress and intensify prevention efforts if required). In this viewpoint, we aim to demonstrate why the method used to monitor progress toward the EHE goals must be carefully considered. We briefly describe and discuss different methods to estimate numbers of new HIV infections based on longitudinal cohort studies, cross-sectional incidence surveys, and routine surveillance data. We particularly focus on identifying conditions under which unadjusted and adjusted estimates based on routine surveillance data can be used to estimate changes in new HIV infections.

  PublisherDOI

• Wake up: the urgent appeal of Allan Pred

  Geografiska Annaler Series B Human Geography · 2023-03-08

  article

  We are living in what geographer Allan Pred called an “extended moment of danger.” Accelerations of capitalist modernity have for decades yielded new sensibilities and situations that have given way to crises of democracy across the globe. While the sentiment that we are living in precarious time has been expressed by many over the years, we believe it to be extraordinarily apt today, and that Allan Pred's later work offers a set of illuminations and methods with which to interrogate, re-present, and make the dangers more intelligible. In this introduction to the special issue “Brute Facts: Hauntings, Racisms and Collective Amnesia” we contend that his work (e.g., concepts of situated ignorance; collective amnesia; the taken-for-granted) helps us understand the intensification of deep and abiding global problems. Pred advanced a way to re-think accepted philosophies of history, progress, goodness, cultural boundedness and other taken-for-granted ideas that are often complex and difficult to make sense of. He developed approaches to examining how political economic shifts impact and are reworked in local, everyday experiences and collective identities, giving rise, for example, to changing dominant discourses of power and contestations created by social subjects in differentially situated locations of gender, race, class, and ethnicity.

  PublisherDOI

• The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Philanthropy and Humanitarianism

  2023-01-09 · 3 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This handbook builds a shared understanding of the troubling politics of philanthropy and the disturbing history and practices of humanitarianism.<br/><br/>While historical work on philanthropy has long suggested a link between imperial rule and humanitarian aid, these insights have only recently been brought to bear on contemporary forms of giving. In this book, contributors link the long history of colonial philanthropy to current foundations and their programs in education, health, migrant care, and other social initiatives. They argue that both philanthropy and humanitarianism often function to consolidate market rule, consolidating and expanding liberal market rationalities of neoliberal entrepreneurialism to a widening population and set of institutions.<br/><br/>Philanthropy and humanitarianism share a history, growing together out of modernist socio-economic relations and modes of imperial rule. However, the histories and contemporary politics of the two have not been brought together with such breadth or under such a critical lens before. Discussing philanthropy and humanitarianism together, combining both historical scope and contemporary iterations, highlights continuities and convergences—making the volume a unique introduction and critical overview of critical work in these sister-fields.

  PublisherDOI

• Model-Based Predictions of HIV Incidence Among African Women Using HIV Risk Behaviors and Community-Level Data on Male HIV Prevalence and Viral Suppression

  UNC Libraries · 2023-11-17

  articleOpen access

  Background:Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) with tenofovir disoproxil fumarate and emtricitabine has proven highly effective in preventing HIV acquisition and is therefore offered to all participants in the control group as part of the standard of care package in many new HIV prevention studies. We propose a methodology for predicting HIV incidence in a hypothetical "placebo arm" for open-label studies or clinical trials with active control among African women. We apply the method to an open-label PrEP study, HIV Prevention Trials Network 082, which tested strategies to improve PrEP adherence in young African women all of whom were offered PrEP.Methods:Our model predicted HIV infection risk for female study cohorts in sub-Saharan Africa using baseline behavioral risk factors and contemporary HIV prevalence and viral suppression in the local male population. The model was calibrated to HIV incidence in the Vaginal and Oral Interventions to Control the Epidemic study.Results:Our model reproduced the annual HIV incidence of 3.2%-4.8% observed over 1 year of follow-up in the placebo groups of 4 completed clinical studies. We predicted an annual HIV incidence of 3.7% (95% confidence interval: 3.2 to 4.2) among HIV Prevention Trials Network 082 participants in the absence of PrEP and other risk reduction interventions.Conclusions:We demonstrated the potential of the proposed methodology to provide HIV incidence predictions based on assessment of individual risk behaviors and community and time-specific HIV exposure risk using HIV treatment and viral suppression data. These estimates may serve as comparators in HIV prevention trials without a placebo group.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sarah Elwood

  13 shared

• Sallie A. Marston

  8 shared

• Key MacFarlane

  7 shared

• Cindi Katz

  The Graduate Center, CUNY

  7 shared

• Marie‐Claude Boily

  Imperial College London

  5 shared

• David Ley

  University of British Columbia

  5 shared

• Allan Pred

  4 shared

• Dan Hiebert

  University of California, Berkeley

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award (2023-25)
• Sigma Xi, Scientific Research Honor Society (2024)
• Max Planck Institute Distinguished Fellowship, Göttingen, Ge…
• Brocher Foundation Fellowship, Geneva, Switzerland (2019)
• Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence Fellow (2014-2019)