As a research affiliate, Carolyn E Lau will continue to work on her dissertation, which examines New York’s gambling ecosystem, its racialization of local neighborhoods, and how communities forge livable spaces amid intensifying privatization. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, her work analyzes pivotal debates over the legality of gambling as critical inflection points in the redefinition of the public good, reshaping who constitutes the public and who “pays” for it in contemporary New York.

Carolyn E Lau is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. Her research examines race, urban development, and community politics. Lau earned her BA in metropolitan studies from New York University and her MA in American studies from Columbia University.