Research
My research sits at the nexus of metropolitan inequality, planning practice, and public education.
For generations, places, people, and public schools have been inextricably linked. Schools shape and are shaped by the social, political, and physical fabric of places. Despite these robust connections, planning scholarship and practice neglect schools. Likewise, the evidence is clear that out-of-school factors deeply affect available resources and students’ ability to learn; however, education research remains stubbornly aspatial. In response, I use qualitative methods and draw from interdisciplinary scholarship in planning, community development, policy studies, and geography to consider how the physical dimensions of schools and neighborhoods and cross-sector collaborative governance shape structures of metropolitan and inequality and, by extension, students’ and families’ lived experiences. You can read my published research on my publications page.
Schools as Centers of Community
My research leverages schools’ physical and social centrality in neighborhoods to understand public schools’ role in community development. This body of work challenges planners and community development practitioners to take seriously issues of public education when addressing neighborhood investments and complicates how we talk about schools as anchor institutions. It also argues for a place-based lens to educational efforts like community schools.
Racial Geographies of Urban and Metropolitan Change
I anchor my second area of research in questions about the role of public sector action in shaping equitable approaches to planning and metropolitan change. This work examines how school district decisions about school infrastructure relate to broader patterns of disinvestment and reinvestment, a city’s larger trajectories of growth and shrinkage, and the racial geographies created as a result. This research clarifies how resistance and opposition to public education decisions are an instantiation of urban political mobilization and an expression of a racialized politics of place.
Access to Opportunity and Mobility Justice
I push the boundaries of thinking about racial and socioeconomic segregation and federal school and housing policies by bringing transportation infrastructure and school travel into the center of questions about integrated and high-quality schools and communities. This body of work makes critical theoretical contributions to both planning and education scholarship by linking largely aspatial education policy conversations with an understanding of the structural realities of regional planning and transportation infrastructure.
I research, write, and speak widely on related topics, including:
Public school closures and the reuse of public school buildings
School-centered community development
Transportation equity and educational access
School and housing segregation
Cross-sector collaboration and governance
Gentrification and displacement
Equitable smart cities investments
Youth-driven urban change and civic education