About
Jay (Jess) Hasper is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science, and the William and Sally Searle Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. His research examines how people build power in response to injustice and oppression, with particular attention to how ideas and theories inform those efforts.
Jay’s dissertation, That We Live Is Protest: A Conceptual History of Black Trans Resistance, draws on archival and interpretive methods to reframe a constellation of political concepts. Rather than foregrounding formally organized movements or publicly recognized acts of protest, the project examines how techniques of survival, aesthetic expression, and other worldmaking practices generate political possibilities and limitations within racialized and gendered regimes of power. Jay develops this argument by bringing disparate historical moments into conversation: fugitivity and gender nonconformity in the antebellum United States; practices of community defense in early twentieth-century ball culture; Pauli Murray’s refashioning of Gandhian nonviolence in the struggle against “Jane Crow”; and Murray’s later organizing in Ghana. Moving across these histories, he shows how attention to the interlocking operations of gender, race, and empire provides grounds for revising established distinctions between survival and resistance, self-making and collective action, and movement and belonging.
His work has been published in Theory & Event. Before pursuing doctoral work at Michigan, Jay was a graduate student at the University of Virginia and an assistant editor for the journal Political Theory.
