Christian Parenti


Christian Parenti is an American investigative journalist, academic, and author.

Early life and Education

Parenti is the son of academic Michael Parenti and Susan Parenti. He attended Buxton School in Williamstown, Massachusetts, The New School for Social Research, and the London School of Economics, where he earned a PhD in Sociology and Geography.

Career

His books include Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, a survey of the rise of the prison-industrial complex from the Nixon through the Reagan Era and into the present, and The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror, a study of surveillance and control in modern society. The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq, is an account of the US occupation of Iraq. In Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, Parenti links the implications of climate change with social and political unrest in mid-latitude regions of the world. Parenti has also reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ivory Coast and China.
Parenti's reporting in Afghanistan was the subject of an award-winning HBO documentary, . Directed and edited by Ian Olds, the film follows the working relationship between Parenti and his Afghan colleague Ajmal Naqshbandi, and after Naqshbandi's capture and murder by the Taliban, Parenti's investigation of that crime.
Parenti's writing is regularly published in The Nation, and he frequently appears on Doug Henwood's radio show, Behind The News, on KPFA in Berkeley, California. Parenti's book Tropic of Chaos was influential in producing the recent PBS documentary Extreme Realities. He has also written for the London Review of Books, Mother Jones, Jacobin, and Condé Nast Traveler.

Academics

He was a visiting fellow at CUNY's Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and was a Soros Senior Justice Fellow. Parenti has taught at the New College of California and at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California. He is Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College. Parenti has also served as a professor of sustainable development at the SIT Graduate Institute.
In 2016, he published an essay in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? concerning the political and economic foundations of climate change.

Personal life

He divides his time between Brattleboro, Vermont, and New York City.

Selected works

Since 2014, Parenti has been working on a book which focuses on "Rethinking the State in the Context of Climate Crisis." In 2012, he published several articles addressing this theme. Other works include:
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