Steve Marotta is a cultural urban studies scholar and teaches in the departments of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University and Critical Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Steve has a PhD in Urban Studies from Portland State University and an MA in Social Justice and Human Rights from Arizona State University. His recent work (including his dissertation) has used affect theory as a window to make sense of the politics of urban transformation and craft/creative movements; this work has been published in Environment and Planning A, Cultural Geography, Planning Theory, Journal of Cultural Economy, and the M/C Journal of Media and Culture. Steve’s research/writing interests gravitate toward questions about the kinds of world building that occur in what Lauren Berlant would call an impasse; the aspiration for his future work is to think through how worlds and attachments are being (re)imagined and (re)organized in the wake of the fraying promises of meritocratic racial capitalism.