Brooklyn Northcross

Brooklyn Northcross is a PhD student in the combined program in African American Studies and Sociology at Yale University and a recipient of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Emerging Scholars Fellowship. Her research explores how Black working-class communities resist displacement and reimagine belonging through creative placemaking, with a particular focus on her hometown of Detroit. Drawing from her undergraduate thesis—advised by Ruha Benjamin and awarded the Ruth J. Simmons Thesis Prize and the Princeton Prize in Race Relations—Brooklyn is interested in how urban redevelopment, gentrification, and the commodification of Blackness shape and are challenged by everyday practices of community building and protest. She is especially focused on how these practices transform the physical and social landscape from the bottom up, asserting visions of place rooted in care—visions that directly challenge top-down approaches to urban development that prioritize profit over personhood. She is eager to deepen her exploration between race, space, power, and resistance in segregated urban environments, aiming to illuminate the grassroots strategies that hold Black communities down.