Part of the BCTR’s Talks at Twelve Series.

Land use policy, racial planning processes and unjust development practices orchestrate the present-day realities in the City of Jackson, Mississippi: a predominately Black school district burdened by the legacies of racial segregation and harassed by racial inequities embedded into the landscape of the city. The Jackson Public School District (JPS) is experiencing ongoing spatial injustice as it grapples with the histories that have led to the impending school closures and the need for facilities repurposing.  Through a collaborative planning process, community members seek to develop a reparative land-use framework that disrupts these patterns of spatial injustice. In exploring this case, we find that the work of repair, what could be understood as reparative praxis (Knapp et al., 2022), is messy and riddled with contradictions as citizens vacillate between wanting reparations that meet the needs to thrive in this existing world and acknowledging the need for something otherwise for repair to be sustainable. In this talk, we will explore the complications that arise when reparative theory meets practice and provide significant implications for those working towards repair in both scholarship and practice.

Dr. Jocelyn Poe is an assistant professor in the City and Regional Planning Department at Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Inspired by her work as a community planner and resident of Mississippi, Dr. Poe’s work is grounded in Black places as sites of struggle, resistance, and care.  As a practitioner, she engages in intensive community engagement processes that continuously remind her of communal responses and resistance to communal trauma. These experiences inform her research as she draws theory from practice while applying theory to practice to build a reparative praxis framework that seeks more just futures. She is a community planner, organizer, and theorist driven by the need to understand the interplay between how places hurt and heal and the role planners and other place workers have in facilitating collective healing. Poe engages in remixed methodologies that require transdisciplinary and creative approaches. Poe teaches reparative methodologies and theories, excited about building practical reparative strategies for future planners and place workers.  Her work resonates with critical issues of justice and equity, which shape our cities and are deeply relevant to the planning field and its future. Poe earned a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Development at the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. She also has a Bachelor of Architecture from the Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Sciences at Tuskegee University and a Master of Community Planning from Auburn University.