Professor Alex J. Moffett-Bateau Wins Outstanding Publication Award
Dr. Alex J. Moffett-Bateau, assistant professor of political science, was honored with the 2025 Anna Julia Cooper Outstanding Publication Award by the Association for the Study of Black Women in Politics for Redefining the Political: Black Feminism and the Politics of Everyday Life.
In Redefining the Political (Temple University Press, 2024), Moffett-Bateau argues that traditional definitions of politics are frequently too narrow to recognize the political engagement of Black women living below the poverty line in the United States and that these limited understandings facilitate the systematic erasure of the political power of low-income Black women. While collecting in-depth interviews and ethnographic data observing the socio-political lives of 31 Black women living in Chicago public housing, Moffett-Bateau gathered a more nuanced set of political criteria sensitive to the context of their lived reality.
Moffet-Bateau has prioritized providing free access to her research. Redefining the Political was selected by Knowledge Unlatched, which offers free access to scholarly content for everyone, as one of their KU Select 2025, making it available for free here, and her other publications can be downloaded for free here.
Redefining the Political was reviewed in Gender & Society and Ethnic and Racial Studies. Additional research by Moffett-Bateau includes "'I Can’t Vote if I Don’t Leave My Apartment’: The Problem of Neighborhood Violence and its Impact on the Political Behavior of Black American Women Living Below the Poverty Line” in Urban Affairs Review (2023) and “Strategies of Resistance in the Everyday: The Political Approaches of Black Women Living in a Public Housing Development in Chicago” in the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy (2023). She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago and a BA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. More information about Moffett-Bateau can be found here.
