FOCUS
How do people exercise their agency to have better and healthier communities, whether these communities are big or small? How can we learn from local knowledge and better engage marginalized voices in the search for equitable access to opportunities, resources, education, and healthy environments? How can we build supportive spaces for minoritized youth and their visions of the future? As part of the program, Katherine will continue working through an interdisciplinary lens around questions of agency, democratic planning, and spatial justice. She is passionate about humanizing education, intergenerational spaces, food and community, and supporting youth and their exposure to arts. Katherine hopes to work in community-based participatory research projects in Austin and in Puerto Rico, that can inform public policy and can contribute to social change within communities.
MORE ABOUT KATHERINE
Originally from Puerto Rico, Katherine navigates her own experience through complicated feelings of people who continue to be uprooted unwillingly, and her personal choice to move and find joy and community in the journey. Still, Katherine firmly stands behind those who reaffirm their right to stay in place and resist unjust displacement.
DISSERTATION GRANT AWARDEE — WINTER 2024
The Right to Stay: local perspectives on the politics of disaster, mitigation planning, and habitat conservation in Espinar, Puerto Rico
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE HPRS DISSERTATION AWARDS, CLICK HERE.
