Brandi T. Summers

Brandi T. Summers is assistant professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how aesthetics and race converge to map blackness in Washington, D.C. and the way that competing notions of blackness structure economic relations and develop land in the gentrifying city. Her current research explores how uses of space and placemaking practices inform productions of knowledge and power in Oakland, California.

Dossiers, Mediapolis on Coronavirus, no. 3, vol. 6June 14, 2021<June 14, 2021

Aesthetic Activism and the Quest for Authenticity in a Time of Crisis

The global pandemic has exposed fissures of race and class in Washington DC. Brandi Summers examines how the aesthetics of blackness have been co-opted in the gentrifying city during a period of crisis.