About Me
I am an urban planning and geography scholar whose research focuses on grassroots planning histories, Black life, housing justice, migration and displacement, and community building. At present, I am a PhD student in Urban Planning at UCLA, where I study, teach, and conduct research across programs in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. In collaboration with the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the Los Angeles Center for Community Law and Action, and other organizations, I have developed a robust research agenda on housing justice. This work is explicitly accountable to people and community-based organizations on the ground, and much of this work is open access or contributes to organizing efforts and/or policy changes.
For my independently undertaken dissertation project, I am analyzing the ongoing dispersal and displacement of Black Angelenos to the region's exurbs - an understudied, yet significant, context of contemporary urbanism for Black American life. I am using archival and ethnographic research methods to better understand the practices and limits of Black collective struggle in an anti-Black state, and to examine the extent to which these practices constitute a planning tradition.
For my independently undertaken dissertation project, I am analyzing the ongoing dispersal and displacement of Black Angelenos to the region's exurbs - an understudied, yet significant, context of contemporary urbanism for Black American life. I am using archival and ethnographic research methods to better understand the practices and limits of Black collective struggle in an anti-Black state, and to examine the extent to which these practices constitute a planning tradition.
