Roderick E. Jackson

“Making Life Liveable” explores how Black working-class men reimagine masculinity, labor, and care within the economic and affective aftermath of deindustrialization in the Calumet Region after the Great Recession of 2008. This dissertation advances a new conceptual framework for understanding how racial capitalism, cultural discourse, and spatial governance, as a historically contingent project, transformed Black manhood amid the ruins of postindustrial decline. Drawing from ethnography, archival research, and oral history, this research documents how Black male laborers redefine manhood, create communities of care, and envision their futures, providing insight into their interiority; a space often silenced in Black geographies, gender studies, political economy, and Black studies. By situating care—rather than production—as a central analytic for rethinking Black masculinity in postindustrial cities as sites of radical placemaking, this project documents how Black male laborers transform spaces of racial capitalist neglect and gender exploitation through collective acts of care, survival, and resistance.