Jessi Quizar, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Chair, MA in Community Planning
Education
2014 American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California, Ph.D.
2006 Sociology, University of Southern California, M.A.
2001 Sociology, Colorado College, B.A.
Contact
Pinkerton Building, 213
Campus Box 358437
(253) 692-5830
jquizar@uw.edu
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 two general areas: 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, Social Identities 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
Dr. Quizar has taught courses such as : 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.
Publications
| 2022 |
Quizar, Jessi (2022), "A Logic of Care and Black Grassroots Claims to Home in Detroit." Antipode. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12842 [doi.org] |
| 2020 |
Quizar, Jessi (2020). “A Bucket in the River: Water Shut-Offs and Racial Discourse in Detroit.” Social Identities. Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 429-445. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2020.1767054 |
| 2020 |
Curtis, Kezia and Jessi Quizar (2020). “Detroitopoly: Who Really Cares for Detroit?” in Safransky, Sara and Bisson, Heidi (Eds.), A People’s Atlas of Detroit. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/72904 This volume received a 2021 Michigan Notable Book Award, awarded by the Library of Michigan. |
| 2019 |
Quizar, Jessi (2019). “Land of Opportunity: Anti-Black and Settler Logics in Detroit’s Gentrification.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal. Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 113-133. https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.43.2.quizar |
| 2018 |
Quizar, Jessi (2018). “Working to Live: Black-Led Farming in Detroit’s Racialized Economy” in Nishime, LeiLani and Williams, Kim D. Hester (Eds.), Racial Ecologies. Seattle: University of Washington Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwnm95 This volume won the 2019 Tarla Rai Peterson Book Award in Environmental Communication, awarded by the National Communication Association. |
| 2004 |
Simone Chess, Alison Kafer, Jessi Quizar, and Mattie Udora Richardson (2004). “Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries!” in Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein (Ed.) That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press. |
