Deshonay Dozier is an assistant professor of Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Dozier received a PhD in Environmental Psychology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Prior to Dozier’s appointment at Claremont Graduate University, Dozier was an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at California State University, Long Beach and Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dozier’s research traces alternative urban futures at the axis of abolition and Black imagination. Through a humanistic social science approach, Dozier examines how urban space is historically constituted as a site of carceral violence and is reimagined through expansive appeals for reparative and liberatory futures. Dozier engages with the fields of Black studies, urban geography, policing and carceral studies, abolition studies, cultural studies, indigenous studies, and racial capitalism.
Dozier is completing a manuscript entitled, Another City Is Possible: Skid Row and the Contested Development of Los Angeles, 1950-2020, which investigates how unhoused and poor people at the site of Skid Row reshape the penal organization of their lives by combatting serial containment and dispossession. In so doing, unhoused and poor people have ushered in the contested development of the city by producing abolitionist alternatives to urban social life. These abolitionist alternatives combat elite visions of urban redevelopment that have facilitated Los Angeles carceral and surveillance expansion. Thus, unhoused and poor people push for an urban future seeped in the possibility of collective repair and spatial transformation. Select portions of this work have been published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, and Journal of Human Geography. This work has also been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, among others.
Dozier is committed to movement-driven research and teaching in Los Angeles. Dozier’s pedagogy centers creative and political movements that co-create knowledge about the world we live in. At CGU, Dozier teaches courses on Abolition, Black Geographies, Black Speculative Futures, Cultural Geography, Humanistic Research Methods, and Los Angeles.
Dozier, D. (2023). To Los Angeles: United in Grief, United in Struggle. Human Geography, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786231189204.
Dozier, D. (2022) Rethinking the Homeless Crisis: Black Spatial Visions for Los Angeles. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 54(3), 752-771.
Dozier, D. (2019) Contested Development: Homeless Property, Police Reform, and Resistance, 1998-2015. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(1), 179-194.