Photo by Angelo Matteo Caglioti
About Me
I am a critical human geographer and interdisciplinary social scientist broadly interested in the racial politics of migration and citizenship, inequality, social movements, and Black geographies. My work engages critical human geography, diaspora, Black European studies, and postcolonial/feminist science and technology studies.
I received my PhD from the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley in 2018. I currently serve as Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. I am a principal faculty member in UCSC's Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program, and an affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center, the Legal Studies Program, and the Visualizing Abolition Studies Certificate Program. I also direct the Black Geographies Lab at UCSC. My teaching is focused on race, immigration and citizenship; political economy; Black geographies; subjectivity and identity; and social theory.
My monograph, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022) explores the politics of Blackness and citizenship in Italy. In this project, I examine the ways in which the Italian-born children of African immigrants have mobilized for a reform of Italian citizenship law in the context of the Eurozone economic crisis and the southern European refugee emergency. This book represents one of the first ever in-depth studies of Black Italian political mobilizations in Italy. I am also co-editor of The Black Mediterranean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and The Black Geographic (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2023).
I am Past Chair of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. I also serve on the editorial boards of the academic journals Environment and Planning D: Society & Space and California Italian Studies.
I am project manager and faculty member of the Black Europe Summer School, a two-week intensive course on citizenship, race, and the Black diaspora in Europe that is held each summer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In addition, I continue to collaborate with activist collectives in the United States and Europe working at the intersection of anti-Blackness and xenophobia.