Annette Louise Bickford
Associate Professor
Interdisciplinary Social Science (ISS)
Office: 706 Ross Building South
Phone: 416 736 2100 Ext: 33833
Email: bickford@yorku.ca
Primary website: yorku.academia.edu/AnnetteLouiseBickford
Media Requests Welcome
Accepting New Graduate Students
My new book, Southern Mercy: Race and American Civilization in Juvenile Reform, 1890-1944 (University of Toronto Press, 2016) examines national belonging and the persistence of racism in liberal humanist frameworks. My current research interests and areas of specialization include climate change and alienation, critical animal studies, planetary security, globalization, and food security.
Southern Mercy: Race and American Civilization in Juvenile Reform, 1890-1944. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Demonstrating the significance of transdisciplinary scholarship in anthropology, social history, governmentality, and critical criminology, this book uses four historical examples of juvenile reformatories in North Carolina to explore how mercy is related to Southern modernity, and how both are related to liberal humanism as understood by scholars such as Foucault and Agamben. In the late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries, New South advocates helped to secure their regional affiliation with the American empire through the showcasing of mercies, variously racialized, gendered, and linked to sexuality. Spectacles of mercy were keyed to the South’s own subordinate status within national U.S. politics, and were crucial to the reinscription of white Americanism in the post-emancipation twentieth-century liberal-humanist context. As citizen-building institutions with a protective and benevolent mandate, juvenile reform served as a bio-political tool of state racism, indoctrinating children of the working and workless poor into white Americanism as compliant labourers. Governing through the microphysics of daily life, with a focus on family patterns as the primary source of poverty and social disorder, Jim Crow training schools extended mercy that was often commensurate with increasing, noncompassionate racialization, with implications for our present-day state of supposed “post-raciality.” This work is organized around analyses of archival records of restricted juvenile reformatory racial policies, a show trial involving white girls who faced the electric chair for the capital crime of arson, negotiations for state funding for the sexual reformation of “wayward” black girls, and a reformatory mandated to protect boys of African descent from lynch mobs. JOURNAL ARTICLES (Peer reviewed) Annette Bickford, “Politicizing Youth Studies: A Review of Keywords in Youth Studies: Tracing Affects, Movements, Knowledges” in Cultural Formations: Art, Techne, Interdisciplinarity. Iss.1. 2013. “The Merciful Executioner: Spectacles of Sexual Danger and National Reunification in the case of George Stinney, 1944” Southern Anthropologist 35(1):41-61. Special issue on race and ethnicity. 2010 “Imperial modernity, regional identity and popular culture in the Samarcand Arson Case, 1931.” Nations and Nationalism: Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. London: Blackwell. (13.2) . July, 2007. 437-460. CHAPTERS IN BOOKS “Popular Culture and the Politics of Revolutionary Education” in Kelvin Sealey, ed., 2008, Film, Politics and Education. New York: Peter Lang Publishers. 2008. 43-70. “Research Methods” “Vigilante Gangs,” “Qualitative Analysis,” in, Louis Kontos and David Brotherton, eds., Encyclopedia of Gangs, Greenwich, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION 2002 Civilizing Adolescence: Race, Sexuality and Nation Building in North Carolina’s Reformatory Movement 1918-1944. (292 pages)
Degrees
PhD Sociology, York University, TorontoMA Social-Cultural Anthropology, University of Toronto
BA (Specialist) Social-Cultural Anthropology, (Major) Psychology, (Minor) Archaeology, University of Toronto
Professional Leadership
2013 President’s University-Wide Teaching Award. York Universityhttp://yfile.news.yorku.ca/2013/05/13/four-recipients-of-presidents-university-wide-teaching-awards-embrace-teaching/?utm_source=YFile_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningEmail
Research Interests
Current Courses
| Term | Course Number | Section | Title | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fall/Winter 2023 | GS/SPTH6104 6.0 | A | Social and Political Thought: Theories | SEMR |
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/SOSC1000 9.0 | B | Introduction to Social Science | LECT |
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/SOSC1000 9.0 | C | Introduction to Social Science | BLEN |
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/SOSC1009 9.0 | B | Introduction to Social Science (ESL) | LECT |
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/SOSC1009 9.0 | C | Introduction to Social Science (ESL) | BLEN |
My new book, Southern Mercy: Race and American Civilization in Juvenile Reform, 1890-1944 (University of Toronto Press, 2016) examines national belonging and the persistence of racism in liberal humanist frameworks. My current research interests and areas of specialization include climate change and alienation, critical animal studies, planetary security, globalization, and food security.
Southern Mercy: Race and American Civilization in Juvenile Reform, 1890-1944. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Demonstrating the significance of transdisciplinary scholarship in anthropology, social history, governmentality, and critical criminology, this book uses four historical examples of juvenile reformatories in North Carolina to explore how mercy is related to Southern modernity, and how both are related to liberal humanism as understood by scholars such as Foucault and Agamben. In the late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries, New South advocates helped to secure their regional affiliation with the American empire through the showcasing of mercies, variously racialized, gendered, and linked to sexuality. Spectacles of mercy were keyed to the South’s own subordinate status within national U.S. politics, and were crucial to the reinscription of white Americanism in the post-emancipation twentieth-century liberal-humanist context. As citizen-building institutions with a protective and benevolent mandate, juvenile reform served as a bio-political tool of state racism, indoctrinating children of the working and workless poor into white Americanism as compliant labourers. Governing through the microphysics of daily life, with a focus on family patterns as the primary source of poverty and social disorder, Jim Crow training schools extended mercy that was often commensurate with increasing, noncompassionate racialization, with implications for our present-day state of supposed “post-raciality.” This work is organized around analyses of archival records of restricted juvenile reformatory racial policies, a show trial involving white girls who faced the electric chair for the capital crime of arson, negotiations for state funding for the sexual reformation of “wayward” black girls, and a reformatory mandated to protect boys of African descent from lynch mobs. JOURNAL ARTICLES (Peer reviewed) Annette Bickford, “Politicizing Youth Studies: A Review of Keywords in Youth Studies: Tracing Affects, Movements, Knowledges” in Cultural Formations: Art, Techne, Interdisciplinarity. Iss.1. 2013. “The Merciful Executioner: Spectacles of Sexual Danger and National Reunification in the case of George Stinney, 1944” Southern Anthropologist 35(1):41-61. Special issue on race and ethnicity. 2010 “Imperial modernity, regional identity and popular culture in the Samarcand Arson Case, 1931.” Nations and Nationalism: Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. London: Blackwell. (13.2) . July, 2007. 437-460. CHAPTERS IN BOOKS “Popular Culture and the Politics of Revolutionary Education” in Kelvin Sealey, ed., 2008, Film, Politics and Education. New York: Peter Lang Publishers. 2008. 43-70. “Research Methods” “Vigilante Gangs,” “Qualitative Analysis,” in, Louis Kontos and David Brotherton, eds., Encyclopedia of Gangs, Greenwich, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION 2002 Civilizing Adolescence: Race, Sexuality and Nation Building in North Carolina’s Reformatory Movement 1918-1944. (292 pages)
Degrees
PhD Sociology, York University, TorontoMA Social-Cultural Anthropology, University of Toronto
BA (Specialist) Social-Cultural Anthropology, (Major) Psychology, (Minor) Archaeology, University of Toronto
Professional Leadership
2013 President’s University-Wide Teaching Award. York Universityhttp://yfile.news.yorku.ca/2013/05/13/four-recipients-of-presidents-university-wide-teaching-awards-embrace-teaching/?utm_source=YFile_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningEmail
Research Interests
Current Courses
| Term | Course Number | Section | Title | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fall/Winter 2023 | GS/SPTH6104 6.0 | A | Social and Political Thought: Theories | SEMR |
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/SOSC1000 9.0 | B | Introduction to Social Science | LECT |
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/SOSC1000 9.0 | C | Introduction to Social Science | BLEN |
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/SOSC1009 9.0 | B | Introduction to Social Science (ESL) | LECT |
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/SOSC1009 9.0 | C | Introduction to Social Science (ESL) | BLEN |
