Joshua FJ Inwood and Anna Livia Brand

Joshua Inwood is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and a research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute. He recieved his PhD from the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia and before coming to Penn State was a faculty member at the University of Tennessee and Auburn University. Josh is committed to understanding the material conditions of peace and justice and is engaged with these concerns through a variety of research and teaching projects. At its heart, his research seeks to understand the social, political and economic structures that make human lives vulnerable to all manner of exploitations, as well as how oppressed populations use social justice movements to change their material conditions. Most recently he has worked on the movement to address human wrongs through truth and reconciliation commissions, specifically the burgeoning truth movement within the United States. This National Science Foundation funded research has engaged with a truth and reconciliation commission that took place in Greensboro, North Carolina in the late 1990s. Other research projects that he has been involved in connect Civil Rights and labor struggles in the U.S. South following the end of segregation, and the way legacies of racism, violence and social activism continue to frame contemporary anti-racist struggles. Josh contributes to literatures on urban spaces, political geographies, justice and historical and cultural geographies as well as others. Recently Josh was given the Stanely Brunn Young Scholar Award. The award is given to an individual, in honor of contributions that have opened up new areas of inquiry for political geographic research. In 2015 Josh received the Glenda Laws Award for outstanding contributions to geographic research on social justice issues. Anna Livia Brand’s research focuses on the historical development and contemporary planning and landscape design challenges in Black mecca neighborhoods in the American North and South. She is investigating how redevelopment paradigms in the 21st century reflect ongoing racialization and her work interrogates the gendered, racialized and resistant constructions of the built environment over time. Her work on post-Katrina New Orleans examines how racial geographies have been reconstructed after the storm through disciplines like urban planning. Her comparative work on Black mecca neighborhoods traces historical and contemporary productions of racial landscapes and resistance to these constructions in New Orleans, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago and Washington D.C.. Anna received her PhD in Urban Planning from MIT and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.