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Affiliated PhD Student

Wilson Hernandez

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PhD Student, Criminology, School of Arts & Sciences

About

Wilson is a researcher interested in how urban and social interventions impact crime victimization. He focuses on Latin America, and in particular Peru, in an effort to analyze the side effects of interventions and policies that, by improving neighborhoods, create advantages or negative outcomes in people’s lives, with an emphasis on gender and racial inequalities.

Currently, Wilson is a Ph.D. student in Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied Economics in Peru and obtained a master’s degree in comparative development studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. Wilson has worked as a researcher at GRADE (Peru) on issues related to policing, gender-based violence, and justice, where he led studies that achieved key policy changes.

Affiliated PhD Student

Austin Lee

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PhD Candidate, Sociology, School of Arts & Sciences, University of Philadelphia

About

Austin Lee is a current Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Black Studies from Amherst College. Her research focuses on Black people’s use of digital platforms to discuss changes in their physical communities. She’s also interested in neighborhood change and how Black women navigate public space.

Faculty Fellow

Akira Drake Rodriguez

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Assistant Professor

About

Akira Drake Rodriguez's research examines the politics of urban planning, or the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. Using an interdisciplinary and multiple method approach, her research engages scholarship in urban studies, political science, urban history, black feminist studies, community development, urban policy, and critical geography using both qualitative and quantitative data and methods. This research agenda is particularly relevant in these politically unstable times, where cities continue to marginalize underrepresented minority groups by defunding public institutions, promoting urban policies that subsidize their displacement while limiting affordable housing options, and continuing the funding and support of a militarized police force. Prior to her fellowship, Dr. Rodriguez taught in the Planning department at Temple University and the Political Science department at Rutgers University–Newark. Dr. Rodriguez is currently working on her manuscript, Deviants in Divergent Spaces: The Radical Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing, which is under contract with the University of Georgia Press. The book explores how the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within its public housing developments. This research offers the alternative benefits of public housing, outside of shelter provision, to challenge the overwhelming narrative of public housing as a dysfunctional relic of the welfare state.   

Selected Publications

“Remaking Black Political Spaces for Black Liberation.” Metropolitiques. 1 December 2016.

Affiliated PhD Student

Shashank Saini

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About

Shashank Saini is a doctoral student of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on understanding violence in the face of rapid  transformations in the political economy of  urban India. Shashank’s dissertation research uses the optic of gendered embodiment, particularly masculinity,  to understand the subject making processes of male youth residing in peri-urban settings in Delhi.

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