Alissa Ujie Diamond is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Diamond’s work focuses on histories of spatialized inequity and action-research as a basis for systems change in the contemporary world. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she draws on an early career in applied architectural and landscape design as well as scholarly frameworks from environmental history, geography, plant humanities, urban planning, and ethnic studies.

Her historical research focuses on racial capitalism and spatial development, probing how social hierarchies have been produced through city-building practices and structures, and how these uneven processes of extraction reach into the present. Her work makes visible the processes and histories of racialized extraction, and explores material, ecological, and social entanglements across time and space to recover possibilities for worlding beyond extractive capitalism.

Her future-facing work focuses on historically-informed and community-driven research for intervention in current institutional systems. In this part of her research, she works across various dimensions. First, her work assesses current institutional frameworks through the lens of equity, and aims to build institutional structures that center action-research for institutional accountability and redistribution of power and knowledge. Her work also combines historical examination and critical ethnic studies frameworks with contemporary technologies to build ethical tools for redistribution of power and resources.  Finally, she draws on her background as a landscape architect and artist to develop methods for engaging art, making, and design to build solidarities and shared historical understandings of place and people.