My Story
I grew up in rural Oklahoma, where emergency rooms were far away, water outages lasted for weeks, and the people around me were excluded from political and economic decisions. While I didn’t experience poverty myself, I saw how deeply abandonment shaped the lives of those around me—and I couldn’t look away.
At first, I thought politics held the answer. I entered college to study political science, but the frameworks felt disconnected from the lived realities I knew. I turned to sociology, and there I found what I was missing: a language for power, history, and resistance. Thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Cedric Robinson, and Walter Rodney reshaped my understanding of the world and my place in it.
Now I’m a sociologist-in-training, working across rural studies, political economy, and radical Black theory. I’ve conducted research in Namibia, taught youth in California, and studied how Americans make meaning of systems like socialism and communism. At the center of it all is my commitment to telling the truth about marginalization—at home and abroad—and helping reimagine what justice can look like.
My Interests
Rural Political Economy
I study how racial capitalism and state disinvestment shape life in rural communities, focusing on infrastructure, labor, and health systems.
Meaning-Making & Political Ideology
I explore how people in marginalized communities make sense of systems like socialism, capitalism, and the state—drawing from ethnographic interviews and critical theory.
Global Development & Colonial Legacies
Through comparative work in the U.S. and Global South, I examine how colonial histories continue to structure development, NGO power, and underdevelopment.
Radical & Decolonial Frameworks
Grounded in the Black Radical Tradition, I use decolonial and Marxist theory to interrogate knowledge production, resistance, and the limits of Western social science.
Let’s connect?
Feel free to reach out.
My name is Garrett Washington 