Katherine B. Hankins, Georgia State University
Katherine Hankins is an Associate Professor of Geography at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta. Her research is concerned with the relationship between place politics and urban space. She has examined this relationship around schooling, housing, and urban redevelopment projects in inner city Atlanta, where she has been conducting research for over a decade. Her current project, in collaboration with Andy Walter at the University of West Georgia and Steve Holloway at the University of Georgia, includes examining the role of faith-based community development, wherein middle class Christians move into high-poverty neighborhoods to live in solidarity with the poor and to offer resources and facilitate a political voice in marginalized neighborhoods. Through this work, she examines notions of politics and neighborhood change, highlighting the ways in which Christian community development efforts challenge or reinscribe neoliberal socio-spatial dynamics. In addition to this project, in collaboration with Anne Bonds and Judith Kenny at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, she is examining the spatial strategies of both a non-profit affordable housing organizations that focuses on place-transformation by building or refurbishing affordable housing block by block in a single neighborhood and Habitat for Humanity, which builds affordable housing across the city. Throughout this work, her concern is with place politics, or how various voices—the dominant and marginalized—translate into the production and reproduction of neighborhood spaces.
Contact: khankins@gsu.edu – Website
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