Research Statement

Background and Research Experience

The margins, the spaces in between theories, disciplines, and institutions, are where planning solutions to our most pressing social justice problems reside. This first became apparent during my career in planning and public finance in Houston and Philadelphia where I witnessed development projects, budget allocations, and planning processes bifurcated or dissolve African American communities. Cultural erasure, a decline in property ownership followed, buttressing racial, class, and gender-based inequalities. However, in some communities, I observed how heritage conservation, often-marginal to planning and public finance, became an impactful tool of resistance. Then, as a doctoral research assistant for the Austin Historical Survey Wiki Project, a crowdsourcing architectural survey application, I witnessed the impacts gentrification and real estate market trends had on African American historic sites. Later, I secured a $96,000 U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant to create The Fifth Street Project, a community-based market study and planning initiative in a low-income community marginalized by a legacy of racist land use regulations. I witnessed during the process, local governments’ unwillingness to invest in a culturally integrated vision for or share fiscal responsibility for infrastructure improvements in the unincorporated area.

Research Themes and Goals

Each research experience revealed the pitfalls of planning in ways that fail to prioritize local agency, culture, and identity. Thus, my research focus is grassroots planning and historic preservation practices in places at risk of cultural erasure, land dispossession, or displacement. Related subtopics of interest include diasporic identities, place attachment, performance in planning practice, social and cultural landscapes, contemporary innovations in land retention and landscape stewardship, and the politics of knowledge production. My work identifies effectual, culturally based planning and preservation practices in historic African American communities, especially those with constituencies and locations, which are difficult to identify. Transdisciplinary in nature, my research works with critical and constructivist theories of development, planning, anthropology, human geography, gender studies, and diaspora studies to detect opportunities for bridging grassroots and formal planning in service of historic African American communities. I apply participatory action, phenomenological, and engaged ethnographic research methodologies and include a variety of knowledge forms such as rituals, annual celebrations, and music. My long-term research goal is to produce scholarship, research tools, and methods, which center bottom up planning processes, and develop formal planning’s capacity to support asset building, agency, and planning in discreet or difficult to identify communities and constituencies around the world.

Dissertation Summary and Contributions

Summary. For my dissertation project, I conducted ethnographic and archival documentation of foundational stories, planning histories, and preservation practices associated with freedom colonies, settlements founded by formerly enslaved Texans. Findings showed that rituals, events, and storytelling reproduced freedom colony culture, attachment, and commitment to stewardship of places even if the settlements were no longer found on maps.

Contributions. Findings and concluding recommendations in the study indicate that new approaches to supporting continuity in homestead ownership and freedom colony settlement patterns is required. I argue that planning agencies should coordinate community development and historic preservation functions by creating place preservation programs focused on addressing regulatory barriers to honoring traditional land ownership and land loss. Further, the varied constructions of identity and place which emerged confound and problematize planning’s operating assumptions about place attachment and the public interest. The study also offers insights into how planning scholars and educators can deploy interdisciplinary approaches to studying and theorizing place effectively within marginalized, rural, hard to access environments.

Current Research

The Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas & Survey. Since 2014, I have been building a growing database of place names and origin stories associated with 550+ Texas freedom colonies, in part, because no comprehensive atlas of settlements locations exists. An Atlas has been constructed using StoryMap and Google Survey to crowdsource and verify place data. This project allows me to test DH tools for the Texas –centered site while preparing to expand the scope to areas where freedom colony descendants originated and migrated such as Louisiana, California, and the Caribbean. Once funded and implemented, the digital humanities project and associated research will address three urgent needs: 1) connecting participating descendants to disappearing settlements and each other through the heritage conservation “hub”, 2) creating a mechanism for tracking and documenting place, land ownership trends, and grassroots planning progress, and 3) increasing historic settlements’ visibility to policymakers, advocates, and planners who make development decisions. Continued ethnographic and archival research represent a significant step toward bridging formal and informal planners’ knowledge creation and generating conditions in which well -informed, equitable development decisions can be made.

Scholarly Articles. See Publications

Book Manuscript. My book project builds upon research on settlement descendants’ approaches to reenacting place and identity. Complex tales of former slaves’ ingenuity and tenacity are complimented by case studies of local asset building, land retention, and economic development strategies rooted in ancestral values, culture, and local knowledge.

DIVERSITY STATEMENT

As an African American woman with working class origins who attended predominately white universities and pursued research interests that challenged hegemonic ideas, I have been made keenly aware of what it means to be an “other.” However, as a researcher, former public manager, and educator, having a lived experience of the margins created opportunities for me to work in a wide range of places and discursive spaces unavailable to others. Among those living and working in the margins, the spaces operating in between disciplines and at the intersection of identities, are where planning solutions to our most pressing social justice problems reside. My research content, contexts, methods, and approach to teaching are all informed by the belief that the unique experiences and knowledge among people formal views as marginal are where solutions, transformation, and possibility reside.

My research emphasizes increasing representation of and the co-production of knowledge with communities of color, especially those in the African diaspora. This focus emerges, in part, from witnessing the subjugation of African Americans’ development concerns as a former planning professional. For example, I was compelled to alter the City of Houston’s approach to soliciting input on the distribution of federal disaster recovery funds after seeing communities disproportionately impacted by natural disasters unable to participate in hearings held exclusively at city hall, inaccessible to many. While a doctoral student, I led a low income, predominately Latino community, marginalized by a legacy of racist land use regulations though a neighborhood plan and market study process, during which I taught students to center community survey responses in their final report to developers and county government. As a result, my research consistently prioritizes people and places at the periphery of urban development and planning processes.

My current work is concerned with cultural agency and African continuities, insurgent planning practice, diasporic identities, and the politics of heritage which all challenge operating assumptions dominating government-led development and planning. My research addresses these issues of place, race, and power by foregrounding African American contributions to planning history and by highlighting marginalized communities’ multidimensional vulnerabilities and radical possibilities. I also employ a diversity of research approaches such as critical ethnography, employing critical and post structuralist theories, embracing unfamiliar epistemologies, and engaging in action research to identify social geographies and constituencies that might otherwise be forgotten.

My passion for diversifying the history of planning, discerning discreet geographies, and promoting equitable development are the foundation of my research, teaching, and service. As an educator, my goal is to create critical thinkers who filter their research and problem solving through an equity lens. To facilitate this awareness among students, I conduct lectures which center proactive drivers who emerge from within diverse communities. In addition to being important content, inclusive history (and critique) help diversify fields such as planning, historic preservation, and geography. Historically marginalized groups, seeing themselves reflected in my scholarship and lectures as agents rather than objects of change, will be more likely to pursue geography or planning majors.

My teaching and service also reflect my commitment to supporting nontraditional students and creating safe spaces to engage difficult questions. Minority and mature students in the School of Architecture frequently contact me for advice on course selection and navigating an intimidating research university. By teaching to the needs of students with various learning styles, placing positionality and reflexivity at the center of research methods training, and recognizing that inclusiveness and equity are as important to how research is conducted as it is to the outcomes sought, my teaching helps create ethical, skilled, social scientists.