The Green New Deal, Public Schools and Environmental Health
Friday, November 22, 2024
11:30 AM - 12:45 PM
1022 HN

Speaker: Dr. Akira Drake Rodriguez
Assistant Professor
University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design

Join Professor Alex Moulton and GEOG 28306 (Black Geographies & Ecologies) students for a special talk by Dr. Akira Drake Rodriguez, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design, focusing on the Green New Deal, public schools and environmental health. She is the author of Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta's Public Housing (UGA Press, 2021), and co-chair of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the AAG.

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About Speaker: Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design.  Her research examines the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. She is the author of Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing (UGA Press, 2021), which explores how both the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within public housing developments. She is also the lead author of A Green New Deal for K-12 Schools, through her work with the climate + community project. She has received funding from the Spencer Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania’s Environmental Innovation Initiative and Projects for Progress to support her work around school facilities planning in Philadelphia public schools. Her next book manuscript examines the role of Black women community organizers in producing collective care in the built environment with the absence of capital and presence of harm over the 20th century. 

For questions, please email Professor Alex Moulton at am16981@hunter.cuny.edu