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Lunch and Learn: "Dispossession by Design" with Bi'Anncha Andrews

Co-presented with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights

This fall, grab your favorite lunch at noon and tune in to virtual conversations with the Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System on topics from how racism is making us sick to human trafficking awareness to increasing equity and opportunity in the sciences. Let’s learn together!

Lunch and Learn returns with special guest Bi'Anncha Andrews  in conversation with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George's County Memorial Library System.

Bi'Anncha Andrews is a doctoral candidate in the Urban and Regional Planning and Design (URPD) program at the University of Maryland, College Park. In addition to her academic work, Bi’Anncha is a licensed social worker and received her master's degree in social work from The Catholic University of America. Bi'Anncha also holds a bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice and a bachelor's degree in Psychology, which she obtained from Trinity Washington University.

Blending these people-focused skill sets with her research interests, Bi’Anncha developed a framework she identifies as “Dispossession by Design,” which she also commonly refers to as “The Oppressors Playbook.” The "Dispossession by Design" framework serves as a critical lens for analyzing and comprehending the intentional and systematic processes of community development and design that target, marginalize, and disenfranchise BIPOC- and immigrant-based communities. It highlights the complicity of multiple actors such as property owners, real estate agents, law enforcement, and government entities and institutions; which either conspire or willfully ignore the escalating neglect of homes and public infrastructure in urban areas historically and/or predominantly occupied by vulnerable populations. By shedding light on the deliberate policies and practices that foster violence, neglect, and decay in these neighborhoods, the framework powerfully exposes the underlying racial, economic, class and gender-based motivations fueling such dispossession, revealing an urgent call for accountability and transformative action.

Utilizing the framework, Bi'Anncha's dissertation research investigates the impacts of gentrification-induced public housing demolition on low-income, Black women, while centering the intersecting roles that race, class, and gender have played in shaping the neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage and limited access to effective social services and social support networks, that these women are forced to reside in. More specifically, her work pays particular attention to the disruptions it causes for Black Women who are displaced from public housing projects. Her dissertation investigates how Black Women navigate their transition out of gentrifying neighborhoods, and how they begin to rebuild the social service and neighborhood-based support networks they were dispossessed of, once they arrive in their new environments. 

It is Bi’Anncha’s hope that both her dissertation and the "Dispossession by Design" framework can be utilized for grassroots organizing, policy advocacy, community empowerment, academic research, urban planning, and social justice initiatives, enabling stakeholders to challenge inequities, promote informed decision-making, and foster reparative and restorative justice in marginalized communities. By highlighting the systemic and harmful nature of dispossession, it facilitates a comprehensive understanding of how design and policy impact social hierarchies and community stability, and paves the way for new opportunities to effectively collaborate on policies, practices, and restoration that improves urban redevelopment outcomes, social service distribution and support network access to account for the losses that vulnerable populations often suffer as a result of exclusionary development.
 
Bi'Anncha has taught Advanced Planning Courses at the University of Maryland including Community Development which she served as the lead instructor; and the Advanced Community Planning Studio course which she served as the Teaching Assistant with Dr. Clara Irazabal. Her research interests and specializations are in Residential and Commercial Gentrification, Anti-Displacement, Dispossession Public Housing Demolition, Residential Segregation, Concentrated Poverty,  Black Feminist Theory, Access to Social Services and Social Support Networks, Restorative and Reparative Planning Practices.