Andrew Ross is a social activist and professor at NYU, where he teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Prison Education Program. Previously employed at Princeton University, he has held positions at Cornell, Rochester, Illinois and Shanghai universities. A native of Scotland, he has lived and worked in the U.S. since 1981, and in New York City since 1993. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of more than twenty books, and has published more than 200 articles in a variety of journals, magazines, and news outlets. He is a founding member of several movement groups, including the Gulf Labor Coalition, Decolonize This Place, Strike Debt, and the Debt Collective, and he is active in the Palestinian rights movement. Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Her previous books include Self-devouring Growth: a Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa;Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic; and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, in 2013 Livingston was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She is an active member of the NYU Prison Education Program Research Collective.
I've dreamed for years that somebody would write this book. It's not only a brilliant intervention but a necessary one. Livingston and Ross explore the profound antisociality of automotive life in a society configured by racial hierarchy. They have thoughtfully illuminated the mutual articulation of automotivity and carcerality in provocative ways that have enormous practical value. - Paul Gilroy, award-winning theorist of race and racism and author of Postcolonial Melancholia