Congratulations to ITS affiliate Justin Hosbey, assistant professor of City and Regional Planning, who received a seed grant from a new program sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.
The grants were awarded to interdisciplinary teams working on climate and environmental equity,
Hosbey is the lead investigator on one of the awarded projects, Georgia’s Sea Islands Exploratory Research: Black Ecologies, Climate Transformation, and Property.
Hosbey’s project, proposed in collaboration with his city and regional planning colleague Zachary Lamb and Courtney Morris, associate professor of gender and women’s studies, centers the history and experiences of Sea Island Gullah communities of the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands. It asks, not why have Gullah communities been destroyed, but rather what combination of socio-spatial practices have allowed them to persist through generations of unrelenting pressure? The team will partner with local communities to co-construct a participatory action research framework to help scholars and activists better understand, and reinforce, Black place-keeping in the Georgia Sea Islands.