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Persons Excluded due to Ethnicity and Race (PEERs) remain underrepresented in university faculties, particularly in science, technology, engineering, math and medicine (STEMM) fields, despite increasing representation among students, and mounting evidence supporting the importance of PEER faculty in positively impacting both scientific and educational outcomes. In fact, the ratio of PEER faculty to students has been steadily dropping since 2000. In our case study, we examine the factors that explain creation of an unusually diverse faculty within a biology department. We analyzed nearly 40 years of hiring data in the study department and show that this department (the study department), historically and currently, maintains a significantly higher proportion of PEERs on faculty as compared to two national datasets. Additionally, we identify factors that contributed to hiring of PEERs into tenure and tenure-track positions. We observed a significant increase in the hiring of PEERs concurrent with the implementation of a co-hiring policy (p= 0.04) which allowed a single search to make two hires when at least one candidate was a PEER. In contrast, three key informants at sister departments reported that co-hiring policies did not result in PEER hires, but instead different practices were effective. In line with one of these practices, we observe a possible association between search committees with at least one PEER member and PEER hiring (p = 0.055). Further, the presence of particular faculty members (Agents of Change) on search committees is associated with PEER hiring. In this case study the combination of a co-hire policy based on the principle of interest-convergence to redress hiring inequities, along with the presence of agents of change, increased faculty PEER representation in STEMM departments. 

This article proposes an analytical–methodological approach to understand this historical conjuncture of speculative urbanism in which global finance capital plays an increasingly important role in urban transformation. Whereas the scholarship on urban financialization makes sharp distinctions between what occurs in the global North and the South, portraying the process in the South as one of subordination or peripheralization and in the North as mature and stable (although volatile), this article seeks to demonstrate that the North–South divide is less effective as an explanatory power. Instead, it presents an analytical approach that is attuned to the relentless dynamism and inter-scalar hyper-mobility of finance capital working across the postcolonial map—in other words, a relational–conjunctural approach. The article suggests the method of “following the financial strategy” by analyzing urban forms and projects as processes constituted by the nexus of practices in finance and city planning. It looks closely at finance’s use of inter-scalar financial tools (such as arbitrage, interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and currency hedges) across borders, sectors, infrastructures, and conditions, as mediated by national and international state actors. The value of this analytical–methodological approach will be illustrated through notable financial transactions occurring in and across cities to emphasize their speculative and financial characteristics—specifically highlighting investments traversing cities of Spain, the USA, and India. The focus here is on financial strategies emerging from the detritus of the 2008 global financial crisis and shaped by the expanding discursive-material formation of speculative urbanism. 

This article contributes to debates on the financialization of global South economies by looking closely at how India’s real estate markets became entwined with global financial networks. We offer an analytical frame that centers on the strategies of global finance and its ability to transform its form and mode of operation when faced with a supposed ‘limit’, both spatially and temporally. Finance capital, we argue, derives its power from working with state actors and ambitious borrowers––across borders, sectors and conditions–– to spawn new investment opportunities and, over time, a financialized type of urban transformation. In 2005, India deregulated foreign investment into land and real estate, a watershed moment that radically altered the financial and urban speculative logics of the sector. Private equity firms made vast investments into urban projects, anticipating massive returns, and even though the bubble quickly burst, India continues to attract finance capital. We explain this conundrum by tracking the new techniques and investment tools of private equity (‘following the financial strategy’), arguing for an analytical approach attuned to the relentless dynamism and hyper-mobility of finance capital (an ‘inter-scalar and conjunctural dynamics approach’).