RESEARCH & POLITICS/ URBANISMS
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Princeton University Press, 2025
Amid political repression and a deepening affordability crisis, Budget Justice challenges everything you thought you knew about “dull” and daunting government budgets. It shows how the latter confuse and mislead the public by design, not accident. Arguing that they are moral documents that demand grassroots participation to truly work for everyone, the book reveals how everyday citizens can shape policy to tackle everything from rising housing and food costs to unabated police violence, underfunded schools, and climate change–driven floods and wildfires.
Drawing on her years of engagement with democratic governance in New York City and around the globe, Celina Su proposes a new kind of democracy—in which city residents make collective decisions about public needs through processes like participatory budgeting, and in which they work across racial divides and segregated spaces as neighbors rather than as consumers or members of voting blocs. Su presents a series of “interludes” that vividly illustrate how budget justice plays out on the ground, including in-depth interviews with activists from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Barcelona, Spain, and Jackson, Mississippi, and shares her own personal reflections on how changing social identities inform one’s activism.
Essential reading to empower citizens, Budget Justice explains why public budgets reflect a crisis not so much in accounting as in democracy, and enables everyone, especially those from historically marginalized communities, to imagine and enact people’s budgets and policies—from universal preschool to affordable housing—that will enable their communities to thrive.
PRAISE FOR BUDGET JUSTICE
“Celina Su’s Budget Justice is a prophetic and powerful call to reimagine how our society allocates its resources—and to whom. It is a blueprint for a moral revival in public policy. Su reminds us that budgets are not neutral—they are moral documents that reveal our deepest priorities. In this age of poverty amidst plenty, Su challenges us to engage in participatory budgeting and demand that our institutions serve the people rather than militarize our communities. Read this book, study it together, and then take it to the streets.”
—Rev. Liz Theoharis, Poor People’s Campaign cochair and coauthor of You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take
“Budget Justice is an elegant, erudite, and intimate book. In its pages, public budgets are moral and dramatic, cruel and community building: budgets are not just austerities that are thrust upon us. They are also futures we can dream up.”
—Alissa Quart, author of Bootstrapped
“Under overwhelming conditions of state violence, Budget Justice is a useful tool for anyone trying to discern what possibilities for material relief—and transformative change—can be won by engaging city budgets.”
—Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid
“In an era of austerity and deepening inequality, Budget Justice is a powerful and urgent guide for communities fighting for equity in housing, education, city planning, and more—through direct engagement with city budgets. In this critical and galvanizing work, Celina Su reveals how the antidote to economic despair lies in collective power.”
—Darrick Hamilton, founding director, Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, The New School
Cornell University Press, 2009
Celina Su examines the efforts of parents and students who sought to improve the quality of education in their local schools by working with grassroots organizations and taking matters into their own hands. Via close observation of activist groups in the Bronx, Su analyzes strategies that may ultimately lead to better and safer schools everywhere and help to revitalize American democracy.
"Streetwise for Book Smarts is a completely novel and provocative take on an extremely important topic. Its great strength arises from Celina Su's street-level research style. This book should be read by community organizers, foundation officers, and policy makers as well as political scientists, sociologists, urban anthropologists, and scholars of community organizing."
—Dennis Shirley, Boston College
New York University Press, 2009
In cities across the nation, many students are trapped in under-funded, mismanaged and unsafe schools. Yet, a number of scholars and public figures like Bill Cosby have shifted attention away from the persistence of school segregation to lambaste the values of young people themselves. Our Schools Suck (with Gaston Alonso, Noel Anderson, and Jeanne Theoharis) gives voice to the African American and Latino students who attend under-resourced inner-city schools, where guidance counselors and AP classes are limited and security guards and metal detectors are plentiful—and grow disheartened by a public conversation that continually casts them as the problem with urban schools.
"The student voices in this striking book are an intervention into the adult-driven stereotypes of urban youth. The students offer stories of anger, challenge and hope. We all need to pay attention to these voices, and act on the corrective lessons they provide."
—Jean Anyon, author of Radical Possibilities:
Public Policy, Urban Education, and A New Social Movement
Jossey-Bass/ John Wiley, 2013
The global health policy literature abounds with titles describing how multi-national organizations, governments, and private organizations have tried to solve development problems and failed. Introducing Global Health (with Peter Muennig) uses a more multi-dimensional approach; further, while it is certainly helpful to learn from our mistakes, this book emphasizes what has actually worked. The book reflects growing interest in the intersection between governance and health, especially in low- and middle-income countries—with a focus on politics and contested notions of accountability and democratic policy-making.
SELECTED PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP/ ESSAYS/ EXHIBITS
Budgeting justice. Boston Review.
In the face of anti-Asian violence, we want budget justice. Gotham Gazette, with Shahana Hanif.
Democracy How? Harper's Magazine.
What Makes Young People Excited About Politics? Washington Post Monkey Cage blog.
Bildung als Farce. Die Tagezeitung.
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Reprinted as "Public Education: An Expendable Farce?” Killing the Buddha.
A Jarful of Stars. Berlin Journal.
Bürger entdecken Bürger. Die Tagezeitung.
Holiday in Cambodia. n+1.
Brown v. Board of Education at 55: Segregation in the 21st century.
With Gaston Alonso, Noel Anderson, & Jeanne Theoharis. The Progressive.
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Also printed in four newspapers nationwide.
Structural violence in a refugee community [photolog]. Asia Catalyst.
Waiting for Gautreaux: Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority and HUD. With Damon Rich and Prem Krishnamurthy. [22-foot-long flow chart on legal arguments and policy changes in the case's 35-year history, pictured here] City Without a Ghetto Exhibit, Center for Urban Pedagogy. Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.
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Included in various exhibits including the Rotterdam Architecture Biennial, 2009.
SELECTED JOURNAL ARTICLES
Su, Celina. 2018. Managed Participation: City Agencies and Micropolitics in Participatory Budgeting. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. [Available here.]
Su, Celina. 2017. Beyond Inclusion: Critical Race Theory and Participatory Budgeting. New Political Science. 39(1):126-142. [Available here.]
Su, Celina. 2010. Marginalized stakeholders and performative politics: Dueling discourses in education policy-making. Critical Policy Studies, 4(4):362-383. [Available here.]
Su, Celina. 2007. Cracking silent codes: Critical race theory and education organizing. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 28(4):531-548. [Available here.]
For links to many of my other academic publications, please visit my academia.edu page.