graduate students

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I am a writer, researcher, community historian, and ethnographer. I am also a Graduate Research Fellow with the National Science Foundation. My research contemplates Black geographies and ecologies, placemaking, dam and reservoir projects, affect, moral geographies, community memory studies, Southern studies, and questions of belonging. I  focus on drowned Black towns of the Lowland South and mythologized notions of "progress" and "modernity" embedded in the sociospatial practices of the New Deal.

My article, "On Swampification: Black Ecologies, Moral Geographies, and Racialized Swampland Destruction" was recently published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. I currently serve as the Graduate Student Representative for the Landscape Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers and I am a co-organizer of the Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference. I am also developing a Black Ecologies library guide for the UC Berkeley library with april l. graham-jackson. 

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I received my B.A. in American Studies, Communication Studies, and Non-Fiction Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

i am a third generation Black chicagoan, former music journalist, phd candidate, and berkeley Black geographies fellow at uc berkeley in the geography department. my research explores how music and sound illuminate the ways Black chicagoans internalize emplacement, navigate urban to suburban migration, and confront how racial capitalist and geographic development reshapes a sense of (un)belonging within Black chicagoland. through music, sound, and auditory placemaking, i examine how Black people define and (re)produce geographic Blackness and the everyday rhythms of Black urban and suburban life. i am the founder of the Black geographies graduate student conference, chair of the Black geosonicologies research group with the center for race and gender at uc berkeley, and i recently published Black scale: constructing "haunted" overpasses as relational methodologies" with robert moeller in the professional geographer. 

before matriculating at uc berkeley, i graduated summa cum laude and phi beta kappa from mount holyoke college with a bachelor's degree in Black geographies. i wrote an award winning thesis entitled: still sweatin'...mapping house and Black bodies: place-making In the Black house music and cultural community of chicago. my  thesis explored the placemaking efforts of the Black house community in  chicago and how they (re)claimed space|place through the formation of  house music, house culture,  and what i termed, "house geographies." 

I am a PhD Candidate and a graduate affiliate of the Berkley Center for New Media. I have served as a graduate instructor teaching courses that range from Biogeography;  Earth System Science; Digital Geography; and World Cultures, People  & Environments. My research centers Black working-class perspectives, experimental spatial representation, and landscape in the Lower Mississippi River Alluvial Basin. My interests blend the  human/physical sciences with the arts and humanities. Currently, I am  studying the methodological potential of augmented and mixed reality for analyzing and representing complex social-environmental spaces and  perspectives.

I am a PhD Student and Fulbright Scholar from SE London, England. I work within the Racial Geographies Research Cluster as an aquatic historian of the Atlantic World and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. My research concerns questions of West/Central African aquatic history and political ecologies, the Slave Ship, racialization, and its origins.

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My research project is concerned with understanding the conditions whereby Blackness became associated with danger, terror, and criminality. I am interested in the origins of this in the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and in sequentially theorizing three spatial contexts: (1) the riverine environments of the west/central African interior, (2) the littoral and coastal areas of this region, and (3) the slave ship and the shark. I will examine the processes which developed an association between Blackness and danger using the themes of risk, fear, and domination. In making these connections, my project will show how the long shadow of these associations reproduces the condition of Black subjugation through incarceration. Thus, I show how the terrorization of the enslaved became terrorizing to the enslavers, how for the enslavers the enslaved became Black, and how Black became dangerous and criminalized.

I am an organizer, community educator, and PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. My research explores the antagonism(s) between Blackness and private property within regimes of racial capitalism. My current project interrogates the role of public housing policy in the ongoing fragmentation of Black geographies in California’s East Bay.

Broadly, my research interests include housing geographies, Third World Marxisms, the Black Radical Tradition, communist organizing and organization, speculative urbanisms, and regional political economy. I am an active tenant organizer in the Bay Area’s Tenant and Neighborhood Councils (TANC) and department steward in UAW Local 2865. I hold a B.A. in Anthropology from Amherst College.

My research explores the role of sound—in its production as music and as African Diasporic expressive discourse—and how it (re)shapes the way we understand the geographies of the Black Atlantic. More specifically, I examine the ways Cabo Verde’s drought-ridden interiors and globally connected coasts (re)produce geographical imaginaries of Lusophone countries through the interconnections between music, sound, space, and place. I prioritize histories of listening as a methodology and emphasize relational practices of collective listening through the sounding of Black places which may inform how we understand Black life in Cabo Verde. By focusing on the sonic events of Cabo Verde, I think with the movements, connections, and circulations of Black sonic geographies that consider how Blackness and Africaniety converge and exist within and across African Diasporic space. 

My research is supported by the Regents Fellowship, the Black Studies Collaboratory at UC Berkeley, and the the Habitable Air Project. I am also the chair of the Sound Studies Working Group and the co-chair of the Black Geosonicologies Research Group with april l. graham-jackson through the Center For Race and Gender at UC Berkeley. 

I graduated with a BA in Anthropology and Psychology, and a BA Honours in Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. I also hold an M.S. in African Studies from the University of Oxford – St Antony’s College, United Kingdom and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. 

My research explores the futures that fishing communities in the cities of Dakar and Saint-Louis imagine for themselves and the extent to which the development policies of state institutions, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations facilitate or impede the implementation of these futures. I draw from Senegal—the country of my maternal grandfather—to examine the different ways that people in various places imagine their futures and struggle to implement them. 

I graduated with a B.A. in History from McGill University and a M.A. in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS in the United Kingdom. I have also worked in Morocco and Canada with international organizations and non- governmental organizations (NGOs) focused on issues of development and migration.

Tamara’s research focuses on rural counties’ reliance on jail  construction, and capacity expansion, within the United States. Housing a  majority pre-trial population, her research spotlights the jail as a  lens through which to dissect the US' national reliance on crime  futurity through maintenance of a “criminal” population. Before joining  Berkeley’s Department of Geography, Tamara worked with Forensic  Architecture in London, MASS Design Group’s 'Restorative Justice Design  Lab' in Boston, and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in New York.  Her background in architecture grounds her research and advocacy  interests in the acknowledgement that design has the capacity to hurt  and criminalize targeted communities; design can also uplift communities  and tear down oppressive scaffolds. 

Tamara grew up in Lima, Peru.

I am a Black Chicagoan, photographer, and PhD Student in the African American Studies Department. My  doctoral research explores Black labor in Gary, IN.—the former steel  capital of the United States—after the Great Recession of 2008. I  investigate how Black male laborers form community to organize for more equitable employment conditions while maintaining strong bonds in  hyper-masculine spaces of socioeconomic devaluation and insecurity. 

I am also a musician, producer, and composer who is part of the Grammy certified production duo Tensei with Chris Kramer.  Our music has been featured on the TV show  South Side  on HBO Max and The Blacklist on NBC. I also work as a solo producer, writer, and composer with sony|kp  and  I am collaborating with my wife april l. graham-jackson on a multimedia project centering the visual and sonic geographies of Black chicagoland.

I graduated cum laude from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with a bachelor's degree in Anthropology.

franchesca araújo is a third-year PhD student in the African American Studies Department. She’s  grounded in the work of Black Caribbean writers and thinkers and  Caribbeanist theory. She is interested in Black cultural geographies,  geopoetics, and anticolonial struggles of the Spanish speaking and  broader Caribbean. Currently, she’s working on Black Dominican histories and geographies outside of what Anne Eller termed the "documentation regime." Politically she's committed to contesting the violences and incoherences  of Latinidad as it relates to Black and Indigenous people.