Sara Safransky

Sara Safransky is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University. Her scholarship and teaching focus on the intersection of urban politics, race and the racialization of space, property, social movements, climate change, and engaged scholarship. Safransky is the author of The City After Property: Abandonment and Repair in Post-Industrial Detroit and the co-editor of A People’s Atlas of Detroit. Her writing has appeared in the Annals of Association of American Geographers, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Antipode, among other journals.

Since 2021, Safransky has been working on a public humanities project called Reparative Geographies with fellow geographer Elsa Noterman and students at Vanderbilt University and Queen Mary University of London. The Reparative Geographies Project seeks to enhance understandings of the spatial imaginaries and land and property politics that surround municipal and local-level efforts to reckon with the legacies of enslavement, colonialism, and racial segregation.