Research

My research is guided by Black feminist and Queer of Color thought. Trained as a human geographer, I am a humanities-centered social scientist who is concerned with knowledge production as it impacts Black queer communities. My work is interested in better understanding how race, gender and sexuality impact the tools used to measure populations. I focus on how statistics and medical technologies of measurement proliferate the historical legacies of antiblack slavery and heteropatriarchy in society.

My work is informed through a deep commitment to represent the world as best as possible. I recognize through the foundational systems of antiblackness and settler colonialism that our understanding of the world comes from those in power who have benefited from historical oppression. I am interested in exposing how a narrow vision of the world is promoted through tools and techniques that appropriate and misrepresent populations in order to benefit a select few. This work extends Black, Indigenous and other communitites of color’s attempts to accurately account for and represent marginalized populations. I use archival and text analysis methods to critically read statistical and other data points in order to reckon and transform their impact in society.

Missing, Loss and the Politics of Absence

This project takes the concept of missing - the property of something once present but lacks a current space and time referent – as a unique site to understand race, gender, and sexuality in spatial processes. Taking a mixed-methods approach combining GIS, interviews and archival research, missing geographies maps into existence the underrecognized contributions of Black people to geographic processes. My first project illuminates Black Queer individual and community response and resistance to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This work is concerned with the role that Black queer folks have in HIV prevention, knowledge produced about the epidemic and the many afterlives of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic. My second project explores recovering and representing Black communities’ contributions to space through places that are no longer present. This project involves finding and spatializing post slavery Black settlements, which have been made into man-made lakes in the United States South. Using archival data and GIS to provide a material representation of Black settlements that are no more, I perform a context analysis utilizing critical theory to understand the ways historical Black community formations’ impact current geographic processes within the United States.  

HIV/AIDS and Black Queer Health

This project centers two research areas, Geographies of PrEP and Southern HIV/AIDS Movement history. The first research area, Geographies of PrEP, seeks to understand how PrEP alters HIV Prevention and Sexual Culture for Black queer communities. Specifically, this work is concerned with how Black sexuality exceeds the boundaries of sexual health with or without PrEP. The goal is to understand how Black sexuality impacts how PrEP is used rather than how PrEP allows for certain aspects of Black sexuality to thrive. The second research area, Southern HIV/AIDS Movement history, collects data on how Southern activist continue to influence the HIV/AIDS epidemic, regionally, nationally and globally. This is an ongoing project that brings Black queer communities to the forefront of HIV/AIDS activism.