New Faculty - Urban Studies Cluster

  • Kimberly Kinder

    Kimberley Kinder is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Taubman College. Kinder’s most recent book, DIY Detroit: Making Do in a City without Services (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), explores how residents in Detroit cope with market disinvestment and government contraction by taking charge of abandoned landscapes. Kinder’s current research focuses on the politics of landscape, memory, and belonging in Detroit’s Arab-American communities.

  • Alexandra K. Murphy

    Alexandra K. Murphy is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, a faculty affiliate of the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research, and a Professor of Public Policy at the Ford School. Murphy is currently working on her book, When the Sidewalks End: Poverty in an American Suburb (under contract with Oxford University Press), an ethnographic study of the social organization of poverty in one suburb. Another line of her research examines the causes and consequences of transportation insecurity.

  • Heather Ann Thompson

    Heather Thompson is a research affiliate of the Population Studies Center and a Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, History, and the Residential College. Thompson has just completed the first comprehensive history of the Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 and its legacy for Pantheon Books, to be released in 2016. In 2014, Thompson published “Unmaking the Motor City in the Age of Mass Incarceration” in the Journal of Law and Society. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City, as well as the edited collection, Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

About the Series

The "Detroit School" series seeks to stimulate an interdisciplinary conversation on how research on Detroit—a city often seen as an extreme outlier of decline—can produce knowledge that is original and relevant to urban studies globally. We hope to foster new collaborations among the hundreds of researchers—at the University of Michigan and around the world—who are studying Detroit and cities like it.

The idea for a "Detroit School of Urban Studies" began with a 2011 proposal to hire a cluster of urban studies faculty at the University of Michigan. The authors argued that as an exemplar of urban decline and racial injustice, the Detroit region "poses questions that older schools of urban studies no longer adequately address." Noting that "major breakthroughs in urban studies have tended to occur when groups of scholars work together in loose association but with a focus on the cumulative understanding of a particular geography," the authors called for hiring four new faculty members whose research would focus on metropolitan Detroit. This proposal lead to new positions in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, the School of Social Work, the Department of Sociology, and the Urban and Regional Planning Program.

The "Detroit School" lecture series was launched to complement the cluster hire and bring faculty and students together from across disciplines to interact and share their work related to Detroit and Detroit-like places. In 2012-2013 and 2013-2014, leading scholars were invited to Michigan to comment on the following questions: "Is it time to establish a Detroit School of Urban Studies? If so, what defines it? How does thinking about Detroit-like cities change the questions we ask and the answers we pursue in the many disciplines that contribute to urban studies? What do we gain by rallying a community of scholars under the Detroit School banner? What do we lose?"

The lecture series culminated in a Michigan Meeting called Learning from Detroit: Turbulent Urbanism in the 21st Century. The conference proposal asked: "What can scholars around the world learn from Detroit that can inform a theoretical, but also a practical, understanding of the turbulent post-industrial urbanism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries?" The panels were recorded and are viewable on You Tube.

In 2015-2016, the "Detroit School" series continued as a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop. This time, lecturers were asked to provide substantive answers to one of the previously posed questions—"How does thinking about Detroit-like cities change the questions we ask and the answers we pursue in the many disciplines that contribute to urban studies?"—by reflecting on their own in-progress research on Detroit. We also began organizing a monthly writing workshop for the dozens of doctoral students, at Michigan and other universities, who are writing dissertations on Detroit.

For our 2016-2017 series, we are posing twin questions to our workshop participants and lecturers: "What topics can’t we understand without grappling with Detroit?” and “What must we know in order to understand Detroit itself?” The series is now led by three doctoral student co-coordinators: Patrick Cooper-McCann, Ph.D. candidate in Urban and Regional Planning; Jessica Lowen, Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology; and Lydia Wileden, third-year Ph.D. student in Sociology and Public Policy. Professor Margaret Dewar (Urban and Regional Planning) and LSA Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and Professor Angela Dillard (Residential College and Department of Afroamerican and African Studies) serve as faculty advisors. We thank the Rackham Graduate School for their generous support of the series.