Urban Politics
Course Title: A Right to the City? Race, Space, and the Struggle for Housing Justice
Day & Time: Tuesdays, 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Drawing on Washington, DC, as our case study, with the goal of preparing students to become effective policy advocates. While our investigation will primarily center the politics of housing and development, we will also consider how where one lives intersects with their education, employment, and exposure to criminalization. For their final project, students will analyze a particular facet of urban inequality and propose a program, policy change, or organizing strategy for addressing it.
Timothy Kumfer
Timothy Kumfer is the Henry A. Wallace Fellowship Program Director at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, where he supports emerging scholar-activists in building skills for public scholarship. From 2023-2024, he was a Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University affiliated with the “Creative Placemaking, Black Restorative Ecologies, and Black Spatial Futures” Seminar. A 2022-2023 Totman Fellow at the DC History Center, he received his PhD in American Studies from The University of Maryland in 2023. His book project, which builds on his dissertation, traces the history of grassroots organizing for political autonomy and equitable development in DC in the Black Power era and beyond.
