Jolen A Martinez

This dissertation asks: how do Black residents of Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhoods live within Black faith traditions that converge with and diverge from financial speculation and predictive policing infrastructures? My research investigates residents’ shared and contested desires for safety and prosperity as they navigate concurrent, racialized anticipations for their future community. To study the tensions that residents experience in their desires for a better neighborhood, I investigate residents’ engagement with predictive numbers, data, and images for housing development and public safety, and I explore how their everyday spiritual traditions– inside and outside of Christian development– contest or bolster these speculative practices. Drawing from anthropological studies of Black religious practice in conditions of economic dispossession and urban policing (Fauset 1944; Thomas 2019; Crosson 2020), I intervene in the discipline by asking about the vibrant hopes and anxieties that Lawndale residents experience from within spiritual traditions that support or challenge gentrification. In pursuit of my research question on Black faith practices and speculation, I ask sub-questions: how might Black Christian speculation practices make future expectations for investment or crime prevention feel more present and desirable? What kinds of racialized anticipations are embodied in Black prophetic practices adjacent and internal to speculative infrastructures?