Author Talk: Cotten Seiler on “White Care”
Join Dickinson College professor Cotten Seiler for a conversation about his new book, White Care. The book discusses how few of us, going about our daily lives, notice the infrastructure that surrounds us and makes those lives possible. What also remains hidden in plain sight is how public infrastructure in the United States has been shaped by theories of race and human evolution. Cotten Seiler’s White Care shows that, from the late 1800s to the present, expert assessments of the quality of the national population have both driven and thwarted the state’s provision of infrastructures of water, sanitation, energy, transportation, recreation, and education. If a nation’s infrastructure is a concrete measure of its belief in its population’s future, what does the current state of American infrastructure say about us?
Lunch will be served and registration is required to attend.
Cotten Seiler is a professor of American Studies at Dickinson College whose work focuses on U.S. cultural and intellectual history, race, feminist and political theory, and infrastructure humanities. He is the author of the books Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago, 2008) and White Care: The Impact of Race on American Infrastructure (Chicago, 2026), coeditor of Engaging Mobilities: Interventions in Pedagogy and Practice (Berghahn, forthcoming 2027), and editor-in-chief of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies. His essays have appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, Public Culture, Social Text, Reviews in American History, and History & Technology. He is a frequent media commentator on US politics, automobility, race, and infrastructure and can be reached at https://cottenseiler.com/
In discussion with Seiler is Dr. Karilyn Crockett. Crockett's research focuses on large-scale land use changes in twentieth century American cities and examines the social and geographic implications of structural poverty, racial formations and memory. Her book, People before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making (UMASS Press 2018) investigates a 1960s era grassroots movement to halt urban extension of the U.S. interstate highway system and the geographic and political changes in Boston that resulted. In 2019 this book was named “ten best books about Boston of the decade” by Boston Public Library librarians. Crockett holds a PhD from the American Studies program at Yale University, a Master of Science in Geography from the London School of Economics, and a Master of Arts and Religion from Yale Divinity School. She served for four years with the Mayor's Office of Economic Development as the Director of Economic Policy & Research and the Director of Small Business Development for the City of Boston and was later appointed the City of Boston's first Chief of Equity, a Cabinet-level position. She is a professor of urban history, public policy and planning at MIT and currently leads the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce in a partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to publish a new study on household-level wealth in Massachusetts.