UC Berkeley

This dissertation project is a critical spatial analysis of urban violence. Using a mixed-methods approach to interrogate youth experiences in Oakland, California, this study contributes to intersectional understandings of race, space, and violence, illustrating the significance of sociospatiality, or the (re)productive function of race and space, in the on-going development of urban space, including material and discursive representations of violence across a local urbanscape. The arc of this dissertation is organized around these central questions: (a) How do a group of Black and other youth of color in Oakland experience and understand everyday urban violence in their local geography, across community and school? How do they understand the racial and spatial contours to risk and safety? (b) How does anti-Blackness, and geographies of race generally, function in the creation and maintenance of urban space, including community violence? how can critical spatial analyses deepen our conceptualization and research of urban violence, including youth experiences with everyday precarity? And (c) How can youth narratives and “theories in the flesh” disrupt and counter-map hegemonic representations of urban communities and violence? Thus, the three-article study is organized around two central pillars: on one hand, it reconceptualizes urban violence beyond the interpersonal and spectacularized, attuned to the mutuality of racial-spatial processes and meanings entrenched in place. Moreover, it provides a richer depiction of (a reconceptualized) urban violence through understudied qualitative youth portraits and “theories of the flesh,” which demonstrate sense-making repertoires and safe-keeping. In demonstrating the sociospatiality of race, space, and violence in Oakland, the gravity and capaciousness of an everyday precarity becomes clearer for these young people’s lives. Overall, the dissertation works as a justice-centered advocacy project to counter-map understandings of urban violence, and asks youth practitioners, policy-makers, and researchers to feel the gravity of their stories and lessons.