Project Abstract
This project, A Revolutionary Plot, builds on my recently published book.[1] This new work of fiction is set in a world where the words of scholars coarse through the veins of volumes. Flowing like currents in rivers, moving beneath the surface, their words bend our reality, progressing in ways that can warp perceptions, cleverly controlling what we all see and understand as society. The world exists in and across areas of study, within and beyond formal parleys of policy relevance, blending methods and myth, sporadically felt, spanning the gamut, everywhere and nowhere at once, in and across an array of samples, simulations and relevant summaries—the Subtext.
This manuscript project accounts the common quest among several, unique Characters who enter this world, each with a distinct, yet curiously connected, research aim: a search for Meaning in their science on race. The Characters collide in a Krewe—a research cooperative—each developing and deciding about their science on race in a space where stories are a subtle means of control that have become corrupt, and where a specific status-driven narrative is currently King.
The shortlist of big questions I aim to soon answer in text are: Where is the racialized, inegalitarian literary and logical set on which the Plot is occurring? Who are these quirky Characters that awaken and experience the Subtext? What type of race scholarship does each use to affect Readers through stories? Can they eventually undermine the world of racial inequality through the Subtext?
[1] Race in the Machine. A fictional account of research on racial inequality in a mechanical society, where individual intelligent machines link up to create massive social machines that mine the environment for resources. Along with constructing a real computational simulation of racial inequality, this fictive work reframes and expands popular theories of race in the midst of interactions among social mechanics at Nearbay Institute, a modestly elitist establishment with ties to the enigmatic Glover-Vignes Foundation.
Primary Conspirator
Quincy Thomas Stewart
Quincy Thomas Stewart is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Stewart’s research artistically explores the processes that create inequalities in socioeconomic status, health, and mortality. His recent book, Race in the Machine: A Novel Account, uses a mix of storytelling and computational models to shed light on the system of racial inequality. Stewart has also published on mathematical methods for studying inequality and estimating mortality, as well as on racial and ethnic disparities in socioeconomic status, health, and mortality.
Stewart completed his undergraduate coursework (BS) in Interdisciplinary Studies at Norfolk State University, and his graduate studies (AM, PhD) in Demography and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the faculty at Northwestern University, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan and Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University.