Dr. Santori is a political theorist who is primarily interested in the racial power dynamics of Western imperialism; linking space to power if you will. Such spatial power dynamics can be applied to the study of not only imperialism per se, but to race in American politics, International Relations theory, Urban Politics, and even crime literature.

WORK IN PROGRESS

“A Right to the City?: The Case of a Parking Lot in Ventura, CA”
Co-Authored with E. G. Garay.

A qualitative research project addressing tensions between use values and exchange values of a city-owned parking lot in Ventura, CA as it undergoes use changes from neighborhood parking and renegade camping by the homeless to exclusive retail parking; interview subjects are residents who responded negatively to acts of resistance and are simultaneously artists and recipients of Federal, “Section 8” public housing.

The Authentically Political.

A book length manuscript drawing its title from Georgio Agamben’s claim that only the lives of those subject to the ban are authentically political. This book addresses the relationship between space, political action, and ‘the political’. Beginning with the notion that violence at places such as universities is held to be ‘peculiar’, I engage ways of understanding bifurcated public space: first as pacified v. non-pacified space (Elias) that is simultaneously liberal/democratic space or not (Mill); I then use the contrast Metropole (pacified/democratic)  v. colony (non-pacified, non-democratic) to discuss the homology between colonies and ghettos (Blauner); the same structure of contrast is then used to explain the distinction politics v. ‘the political’ (Schmitt, Arendt) in spatial rather than in temporal terms. Segmented space (such as residential segregation) therefore has political, as well as social and economic, impacts. This elucidation enables me to engage the theoretical literature on space and politics (Massey, Laclau, Lefebvre) to reveal the qualitative distinctions between institutionalized politics (and political science within the university) and what is authentically political in Agamben’s sense of that term; between City Hall and the street.