Jessi Quizar, Ph.D.

Dr. Jessi Quizar is a scholar of racial capitalism, grassroots planning, and urban land and resource struggles in the U.S.  She came to UWT in 2021.  

Her research centers: 1) race and urban land and resource struggles and 2) what Robin D.G. Kelly has called “freedom dreams” with regard to urban space—that is, the aspirations, theorizing, planning, and experimentation by BIPOC in the United States to claim and shape cities, neighborhoods, and communities.  Much of her work has focused on the city of Detroit. 

Dr. Quizar has published in journals such as Antipode; Theory, Culture, and Society;  and American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She has contributed to edited volumes such as A People’s Atlas of Detroit (Wayne State University Press, 2020) and Racial Ecologies (University of Washington Press, 2018), which won the 2019 Tarla Rai Peterson Book Award in Environmental Communication.  As a graduate student, she also co-wrote the piece “Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries,” which is included in That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull Press, 2004, 2008), and which has been anthologized in Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge, 2010), Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies (Routledge, 2017), and Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2020). She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.

Her current areas of interest include:

• Grassroots urban planning
• Gentrification and race
• Anti-Black racism and settler colonialism
• Black and Indigenous social movements
• Urban agriculture
• Detroit

At UWT, Dr. Quizar has taught Movements and Community Organizing; Property and Capital; as well as the UWT Community Planning Studio.

Currently, she is a board member of Do.Deca.Hedron Black and Indigenous LGBTQ+ Spatial Arts, a land-based abolitionist project in northern Georgia.  She is a former national board member of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association and Incite! Women of Color against Violence.