A collective study lab

Asha BEST

Assistant Professor of Geography at Clark University

Asha Best is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Rutgers University, and a Masters in Pan African Studies from Syracuse University. Her research is concerned with Black informality as a means of understanding urban crisis and the making of cities after 1965. She extends this research to consider various practices of planning and surveillance that seek to foreclose upon Black people’s collective experiments with the urban. Her research has been published in Society & Space and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and supported by the Urban Studies Foundation. She is currently at work on a digital project exploring the relationship between urban restructuring and contemporary practices of policing through data visualization and visual storytelling. She is involved in of a number of collaborative engagements aimed at promoting collective study on the promise and practice of spatial justice, including co-curating the current season of Antipod, a radical geography podcast.

Selected publications

Best, Asha and M.M. Ramírez. 2021. “Urban Specters.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

Brooks, I. and Best, Asha. 2021. “Prison Fixes & Flows: Carceral Mobilities and their Critical Logistics.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39(2), 459-476.