The Evasion Lab is a research collective committed to thinking the underside of surveillance. We focus on the themes of data, law, and finance—to consider how institutions and individuals (for better, for worse) make themselves illegible and thus ungovernable.
01
The Evasion Lab pairs with a wide range of public facing institutions to debate, speculate, and theorize across the disciplinary grid.
02
The Evasion Lab sustains an ongoing conversation among members, fellows, and invited guests about evasion’s analytical capacity.
University of Toronto
University of Toronto
Kamari Maxine Clarke is a Professor of Transnational Justice and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto where she teaches in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Clarke’s current project interrogates questions of evidence, knowledge formation and new technologies in relation to the uses of Artificial Intelligence, big data, geo-spatial technologies and digital humanitarian-crisis tracking tools by which to understand how civil society groups are engaged in mobilizing knowledge about violence and the disappeared. She examines this in relation to the ways that perpetrators of violence engage in evasion practices to render their work illegible to such forms of documentation.
kamari.clarke@utoronto.ca
Columbia University
Naor Ben-Yehoyada (PhD, Social Anthropology, Harvard University, 2011) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. His work examines unauthorized migration, criminal justice projects, the aftermath of development, and transnational political imaginaries in the central and eastern Mediterranean. His monograph, The Mediterranean Incarnate: Transnational Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II, offers a historical anthropology of the recent re-emergence of the Mediterranean, as an example for the processes through which transnational regions form and dissipate. His current work follows anti-Mafia investigators of different professions and the ongoing process of the criminalization of ritual association.
nhb2115@columbia.edu
University of Michigan
Columbia University
Claudio Lomnitz is an anthropologist, historian and critic who works broadly on Mexican culture and politics. Lomnitz teaches at Columbia University, where he is the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology, and served for eight years as the founding director of the Center for Mexico and Central America. Lomnitz is a member of Mexico’s El Colegio Nacional. His books include Death and the Idea of Mexico and The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón, among many others. As is a regular columnist in the Mexico City press, and an award-winning dramaturgist. His most recent book Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation (Other Press, 2021) tells the story of his grandparents’ life and movements from Eastern Europe through much of South America, and reflects on the connection between Jewish emancipation and (South) American consciousness. Lomnitz is committed to contributing to bringing the historical social sciences into public debate.
cl2510@columbia.edu
London School of Economics
Austin Zeiderman is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in the cultural and political dimensions of urbanization, development, and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a specific focus on Colombia. Austin’s first book, Endangered City, examines the imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future threats and its implications for cities and urban life. His current research moves beyond the city to examine the centrality of racialization to a large-scale environmental infrastructure project on Colombia’s Magdalena River.
A.Zeiderman@lse.ac.uk
University of California
Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Ananya is a scholar of global racial capitalism and postcolonial development whose research is concerned with the political economy and politics of dispossession and displacement. With theoretical commitments to postcolonial studies, Black studies, and feminist theory, she seeks to shift conceptual frameworks and methodologies in urban studies to take account of the colonial-racial logics that structure space and place. As a researcher, Ananya strives to advance research justice, by which she means accountability to communities directly impacted by state-organized violence. At the very heart of her work is an insistence on the transformation of the public university – through teaching, public scholarship, and community engagement – so that it can be a force for social justice.
ananya@luskin.ucla.edu
Princeton University
Laurence Ralph is a researcher, writer and filmmaker. He has held tenured appointments in the African & African American Studies and Anthropology Departments at Harvard. He is currently a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. Ralph has been awarded many fellowships for his work, some of which include the Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellowships, as well as grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the National Research Council of the National Academies. He is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Director of the Center on Transnational Policing (CTP).
lralph@princeton.edu
Universidad de los Andes
Sergio Montero is Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning and Development at CIDER, an interdisciplinary research center of development studies at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He is Director of the Urban Narratives Lab (LabNa) and associate editor of Regional Studies. Sergio’s research is interested the politics of urban planning, the co-production and global mobilization of urban and regional knowledge and in institutional approaches to local and regional development, particularly in Latin America. His current research focuses on how the rise of legal and judicial action around Bogotá’s urban planning projects is reconfiguring the politics of expertise, participation and inclusion in the city.
s.montero@uniandes.edu.co