Akilah Favors is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of California- Berkeley. She examines the connections between urban development and the politics of social change, specifically as it pertains to race, gender, and class relations. As a Black feminist scholar, her research agenda focuses on identifying and analyzing: (1) the reproduction of race, gender, and class inequality in neoliberal economies of gentrification; (2) the political economy of Black resistance to urban displacement; and (3) how the heterogeneity of Black identity/culture is navigated to fortify Black solidarity against systemic racism in urban environments. These three themes encapsulate the multifaceted premise of her dissertation, which examines the often-overlooked presence of Black agency amid the prevalence of racial violence in urban spaces.

To explore these dynamics, her doctoral project focuses on the unprecedented decline of the Black Mecca of the South- Atlanta, Georgia. Focusing on the city’s last predominantly Black region, she explores how Black-led nonprofits in Southwest Atlanta build interclass solidarity with low-income residents to address three major catalysts of Black displacement - unaffordable housing, economic insecurity and cultural erasure. Tracing Black organizational responses to privatization, welfare deregulation, and market-centered practices, her work illuminates progressive alternatives to neoliberal forms of governance that often neglect, criminalize, and displace the Black urban poor during critical junctures of urban change. She specifically highlights efforts to curtail the expansion of housing speculation via the large-scale privatization of inner-city housing by private firms, pervasive criminalization of the Black urban poor that profits privatized prisons, and chronic underinvestment in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Her investigation draws on ethnographic, interview and content analysis methods to theorize the ways Black determination, innovation, and placemaking function as institutional resistance to a political economy that continues to uproot Black inner-city neighborhoods nationwide.

Prior to graduate school, Akilah conducted an award-winning project on youth participation in the Afro-descendant in Argentina and researched student protests for diversity at Afrikaans Universities in South Africa. Her research has been supported by the National Trust for Historic Preservation: African American Heritage Fund, UNCF Mellon Mays Foundation, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Black Studies Collaboratory, the Black Graduate Collective and the UC-HBCU Initiative. Akilah holds a B.A. from Spelman College and a M.A. from UC Berkeley, both in Sociology.

In her spare time, Akilah enjoys weightlifting, hiking, cooking, traveling, supporting Black businesses, and spending time with family.