About

Morgan P. Vickers is an Assistant Professor of Race/Racialization in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington. They are also an affiliate faculty member with the Center for the Study of Demography and Ecology and the Center for Environmental Politics. Vickers received their Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research illuminates racialized ecologies, 20th-century infrastructure projects, the social construction of race, and eco-social repair. They are centrally concerned with how racialized populations and their environments have been historically defined using the same language of damnation, pestilence, and threat in order to destroy both through legal and extralegal maneuvers. Vickers is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the social, racial, and legal construction and transformation of swamplands in the Lowcountry South, aiming to illuminate how environmental and racial myths are legitimized through American policy measures and infrastructural development projects designed to facilitate the simultaneous erasure of undesirable people and unruly ecologies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Gender studies
• Law
• Environmental ethics
• Ecology
• Political economy
• Art
• Anthropology
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Book forum: Javier Arbona-Homar, <i>Explosivity: Following What Remains</i> (University of Minnesota Press, 2025)

  Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2026-03-29

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings

  The AAG Review of Books · 2025-08-08

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Rendering Speculative Pasts: Visualizing Drowned Towns and Submerged Ecologies

  American Anthropologist · 2025-05-24

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article is part of the special section of American Anthropologist titled "On Vanishing Fieldsites."The multimodal accompaniment to this article is

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fixing crisis, transforming landscapes: Social, spatial, ecological, and racial fixes in New Deal South Carolina

  Environment and Planning F · 2024 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  This article examines the spatial, social, ecological, and racial fixes of the Santee-Cooper Project, a New Deal hydroelectric project constructed between 1938 and 1942 that inundated the homes of 901 Black, Indigenous, and poor White families in central South Carolina. Drawing upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of crisis, and Clyde Woods and David Harvey’s notion of the (socio-)spatial fix, the research underscores how the New Deal attempted to address economic, political, and racial crises by implementing a series of fixes aimed at stabilizing economic markets while reshaping ecological and racial landscapes. This article reveals how the New Deal reconfigured Black geographies and ecologies, displacing communities and ecosystems in the name of progress. By scrutinizing local administrative practices and broader regional consequences, the article highlights the far-reaching impacts of state-initiated development amid crises of racial capitalism. The analysis concludes with an attention to the Green New Deal, pushing back against the fixity inherent in the original public works program, and advocating for a nuanced approach to repair in the face of environmental crises. By reassessing the historical significance of the New Deal and the missteps made in the face of early 20th-century crises, this research informs debates on socio-environmental justice and equitable development, offering guidance for navigating crises in the modern era.

  PublisherDOI

• On Swampification: Black Ecologies, Moral Geographies, and Racialized Swampland Destruction

  Routledge eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Anthropology

  This article introduces swampification, a social and methodological process whereby governments, corporations, and the press socially (re)invented swamplands as spaces of death, disease, and “uninhabitability” to justify their destruction. Using the case of the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project in New Deal South Carolina, this article demonstrates how White institutions sought to eradicate Black autonomous spaces and ecological connections. I build on Black ecologies, a subfield that aims to illuminate conditions and relations Black people have with/in ecological and social worlds that comprise struggles for existence and legacies of world building. I propose coupling Black ecologies with moral geographies to bring attention to the sociospatial imaginaries placed on Black people that forced them to the ecological margins, then later extracted them from those very spaces when the landscapes stood in the way of White progress. Swampification did not merely stagnate Black terraqueous landscapes but further perpetuated racial stereotypes of Blackness as out-of-place and pestilent, and situated the presence of non-White others as antithetical to U.S. progress.

  PublisherDOI

• On Swampification: Black Ecologies, Moral Geographies, and Racialized Swampland Destruction

  Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2022 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Environmental ethics

  This article introduces swampification, a social and methodological process whereby governments, corporations, and the press socially (re)invented swamplands as spaces of death, disease, and “uninhabitability” to justify their destruction. Using the case of the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project in New Deal South Carolina, this article demonstrates how White institutions sought to eradicate Black autonomous spaces and ecological connections. I build on Black ecologies, a subfield that aims to illuminate conditions and relations Black people have with/in ecological and social worlds that comprise struggles for existence and legacies of world building. I propose coupling Black ecologies with moral geographies to bring attention to the sociospatial imaginaries placed on Black people that forced them to the ecological margins, then later extracted them from those very spaces when the landscapes stood in the way of White progress. Swampification did not merely stagnate Black terraqueous landscapes but further perpetuated racial stereotypes of Blackness as out-of-place and pestilent, and situated the presence of non-White others as antithetical to U.S. progress.

  PublisherDOI