Megan Faust is a PhD candidate in the City, Culture, and Community Program’s Urban Studies track at Tulane University, studying the intersection of race and space. Her dissertation work seeks to articulate how racial trauma becomes emplaced as well as the implications of its emplacement through a comparative study of three sites: Norco, Louisiana; the Twelfth Street neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan; and the Hunter’s Point neighborhood in San Francisco, California.

The study aims to understand how historical racial traumas actively craft contemporary geographies, investigating sites of emplaced racial trauma as they are materially (re)produced, culturally embedded, and affectively experienced. She hopes this work will contribute a concept that details the intertwined effects of racism and place-based injustice more fully, drawing from disparate geographies and histories to discern the characteristics of spatialized racial harm that are consistent through time and space.

While in residence, Megan worked with her cohort mate, coauthor, and companion Devin Wright to prepare a manuscript on potholes and infrastructures of citizenship.