Douglas Allen, PhD
Lecturer
Middle Tennessee State University
Department of Global Studies and Human Geography
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Black Geographies and Place-Making
My research engages with Black geographies at the nexus of race and place. In particular, my work looks at how black communities envision, express, and understand place. My current theoretical work argues that place-making is a vital geographic practice for marginalized communities and that relational place-making is particularly useful for scholars interested in black geographic visions, experiences, and practices (in short, black geographies). My empirical work looks at how black students in an HBCU marching band use and expreience the place and how they deploy place-making strategies to re-articulate how others understand their HBCU, black communities, and the city more broadly.
Social Justice and Urban Change
I am interested in the socio-cultural justice implications of urban change. I am interested in how black communities resist and envision socio-cultural changes from gentrification. My empirical work looks at ongoing expansion by a PWI (predominantly white institution) into the spaces of black communities and how gentrification is encroaching upon HBCUs as well. I am particularly interested in how the (largely) permanent material changes made by gentrifiers limit the ability of marginalized communities to resist in the immediate and restrict the ability to maintain a sense of place for future resistance.
Whiteness and Memorial/Commemorative Landscapes
My past research has engaged with race, memory, and landscapes. In particular looking at the way memory and history is deployed and made through whitewashed landscape narratives of neo-Confederates. In particular, I engage with how the landscape is utilized to further their black Confederate soldier myth. This myth is then used to re-frame the South and Southern history as part of a project that seeks to absolve the Confederate Battle Flag as a racist symbol.
Geographies of Joy and Affirmative Resistance
I am interested in the possibilities of joy as resistance to social injustice and affirmative strategies of resisting oppression. Geographies of joy have the potential to highlight not simply what worlds/visions we reject and are fighting against but to center alternative, more just visions of society and the city. As part of this, I am currently researching affirmative resistance strategies (resistance focused primarily on affirming marginalized lives and ways of life) and the socio-spatial power to re-produce place to meet, even if temporarily, marginalize visions. These enactments of resistance, while often tacitly rejecting oppressive visions, focus on envisioning places/societies outside oppression and produce places of respite that affirm marginalized lives and ways of life.