Visiting Assistant Professor
she/her
Camille Petersen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University. She specializes in race and ethnicity, social theory, and globalization. Her article “Capitalizing on Heritage: St. Augustine, Florida, and the Landscape of American Racial Ideology” is published in City & Community in their special issue on racial capitalism. In the article, she applies the concepts of racial capitalism and settler colonialism to understand gentrification, challenging the hegemony of neoliberal and colorblind urbanisms and arguing that the longue durée world system of racism structures capitalism and the urban process. The case study of St. Augustine, Florida, shows the role of White nationalist place-making in consolidating the material and ideological structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, past and present, in what she calls the “heritage industrial complex.”
Dr. Petersen’s innovative methods combine extended case study, critical discourse analysis, and comparative-historical sociology to analyze and understand present-day ideologies and how they are embedded in historical storytelling, the landscape, and our own colonial-modern subjectivities.
Her research and teaching interests also include feminist and queer theory, leisure studies, and urban sociology.