📣🏆2026 Best Article in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity & the City Award Recipient: Akira Drake Rodriguez urbanaffairsassociation.org/2026/03/04/a... @akirarodriguez.bsky.social

I'm deeply honored to have received the Founder's Prize for the best article of the year in Social Science History. It's especially meaningful because SSHA has been such a generative and welcoming community for me as the co-chair of the Historical Geography and HGIS network.

The US is the purple line bottoming out. Our economy may still roar, but we’re killing ourselves. Hoarding wealth, refusing to even ensure our kids have enough to eat. That line is an indictment. It reflects our warped values.

What better way to start a new semester and return from maternity leave than to share a new paper with my brilliant co-authors! We examine Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) through a critical urban theory lens

During the 1970s, an arson wave ravaged poor communities across the US. Some lost 80% of their housing. Residents were blamed. In reality, landlords—paid by insurers and enabled by the state—drove this arson-for-profit epidemic. 

I reviewed @benchansfield.bsky.social's revelatory BORN IN FLAMES:

New from me on scholarship by @cbswope.bsky.social et al. "As the Trump Administration attempts to eviscerate fair housing...regulations...we need to recognize the persistence and resilience of racial-capitalist exploitation and dispossession, and not view it only as some relic of an earlier era."

Glad to see this piece out! In it, we trace the explosion of HOLC redlining studies in public health research over recent years and propose that scholars widen their focus to include some of the myriad other discriminatory processes that have generated racial health inequities.

🧵A much-needed corrective to the “HOLC redlining was the primary/root cause of everything bad” literature that has exploded since the HOLC maps were digitized. A more complicated, but still heavily racialized story. Lots of other private and public discriminatory policies & practices involved.

Belatedly introducing a new piece on racial capitalism, redlining, causality, and public health that I was lucky enough to work on with coauthors @snmarkley.bsky.social, Shannon Whittaker, and Amy Hillier! ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/... 1/

“The issue is that Khalil and the others who have been abducted in recent weeks are being jailed because they were dissident protesters, student organizers, op-ed authors, and anti-genocide activists. In other words, they have been targeted for their political views. They are political prisoners.”

1. Every Dem Senator should be doing this, at minimum, for their constituents. 2. Why won't my Senators in New York do this for my fellow Columbia students incarcerated in Louisiana? It's a quicker flight.

It is also notable that Georgetown immediately put out this statement defending their community member. Columbia still has not mentioned Mahmoud or Ranjani by name.

SWC stands by Ranjani Srinivasan, yet another union member targeted by the Trump administration and abandoned by our employer Columbia University. Columbia WAS complicit. Read more:🧵

Columbia University PhD student Ranjani Srinivasan had her visa unjustly revoked without explanation and was forced to flee the US. Despite being in academic good standing, Columbia withdrew her enrollment and her legal status was terminated without due process.

Before Mahmoud Khalil's detention last week, ICE came for a Columbia PhD student. She had nothing to do with the Gaza protests, but was arrested last spring during a roundup while trying to walk home. Charges were dismissed. The State Department still revoked her visa.

Research from 2022 that every Democrat apologist should chew on: “We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right.“ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This is really, really bad. Columbia made the mistake of thinking that placating the administration would spare them. Other universities made the mistake of thinking it would stop with Columbia. It won’t stop without disciplined pushback; it’s an existential question for American universities.

One might think that Columbia would want to put out a statement defending its students and making sure they feel protected. Instead, it wants to clarify that there are circumstances in which they will open the door for ICE to enter and snatch international students.

My union @swcolumbia.bsky.social has created a resource to support international students who are experiencing increasingly higher risk of immigration enforcement. We have done this on our own time while the University has remained silent and complicit. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

SWC condemns the ICE/DHS raids on Columbia's campus. We call on President Armstrong to protect international students from immigration enforcement and reinstate Columbia as a sanctuary campus. Statement: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

“The president of the United States is illegally impounding critical research funds in an attempt to silence members of the Columbia community. As a university committed to free inquiry, free expression and the rule of law, we categorically reject these efforts and will see him in court.”

But seriously Columbia how did anticipatory obedience work out for you

A lot of Irish Americans — too many of whom are MAGA —need to draw on their immigration history of being starved out of their home country by a hateful, imperial occupier enforcing deliberately cruel laws. It is a sin to view people as ‘other’ when your ancestors suffered that fate.

Call for papers in the Journal of Urban Affairs! "Stopping a Tsunami: learning from and beyond emergency tenant protections during the Covid-19 pandemic." think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issu... Abstracts due to editor @lkb-pdx.bsky.social March 12!

When the Trump administration escalates its attacks on academic freedom, don’t count on Democrats or university leaders to hold the line. They’re attacking it all on their own. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

just gonna be the thousandth person to remind you all that segregationists start the open bigotry with people they feel they can target most easily but do not end there

Wrote about the morally vacuous, strategically unsound (and also wrong!) anti-“woke”diagnosis everyone’s still sticking with, even in the midst of civil rights apocalypse.

New database alert! "A national data set of historical US sundown towns for quantitative analysis", based on work by @rigbydavid.bsky.social and many Landscapes Labs collaborators is now available! www.nature.com/articles/s41...