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Background

Chandiren Valayden is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work traces the conceptual histories of race and racism as a way of understanding the political crises of the present. Drawing on scholarship from political theory, urban studies, anthropology, and cultural studies, he examines how conceptions of race and racist practices shape social order. Conversely, he is equally interested in how race and racism are themselves transformed by shifting political and cultural conditions.

Recent work has probed the rise of right-wing politics in the US and beyond, with a particular emphasis on analyzing the meaning-making and space-making practices of the political right. Another recent line of work investigates how counterinsurgency, urban policing, and warfare transform practices of dehumanization and thus shape the very contours of social order. His work has appeared in Theory, Culture & Society, Humanity, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and The Journal of Right-Wing Studies.

These lines of inquiry converge in Valayden's current book project, which expands the concept of “racial feralization” as an analytic for understanding planetary racial governance. Drawing on military archives, media discourses, and urban policies, he argues that figures of the “feral” – feral cities, feral youths, and feral migrants – as well as analogies of wilding and degeneration, increasingly shape governmental interventions in cities worldwide. He argues that racism is expressed as a planetary government of the feral (those deemed to have regressed to a pre-social state) across interlinked urban landscapes.

Education

• MA, PhD, University of California - Irvine
• MPhil, Trinity College Dublin
• BA, Griffith College Dublin

Research Interests

• Theories of race and racism
• Counterinsurgency and policing
• Right-wing political extremism
• Political geography and theories of space

More Info

Selected publications

2025 (with Alexandra S. Moore) “‘Dominating the Battlespace’: Right-wing tactical performances and the spatial politics of postdemocracy.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

2024 (with Belinda Walzer and Alexandra S. Moore) “The Ordinariness of January 6: Rhetorics of Participation in Antidemocratic Culture.” Journal of Right-Wing Studies 2(1): 92-97.

2022 (with Jakob Feinig) “Humanization as Money: Modern Monetary Theory and the Critique of Race.” Humanity 13 (2): 146-157

2022 “Normalizing Counterinsurgency in the United States: First Responders as the First Line of Defense.” Small Wars and Insurgencies 33 (4-5): 673-692

2022 “Provincializing Trump: Organized Displacement in Global Politics.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 112 (3): 636-643

2016 “Racial Feralization: Targeting Race in the age of Planetary Urbanization.” Theory, Culture & Society 33 (7-8): 159-182