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Isis Moon Gamble
Ph.D. Candidate in Urban and Public Policy

Isis is a Ph.D. Candidae in Public and Urban Policy at The New School. She has a Master of Urban Design and Planning from University of Washington (2021) and a BS in Community Development from Portland State University (2017). She has over eight years of research experience, primarily focused on spatial politics, affordable housing policy, and public transportation equity. She has worked with the Portland Water Bureau, Seattle Housing Authority, the City of Bellevue, and the City of Bellingham and has provided and presented research to city councils for affordable housing policies in both suburban and urban communities. 

Her time working on a pilot program regarding transit equity at Seattle Housing Authority inspired her to pivot from studying affordable housing to transportation policy, though she sees a symbiotic relationship between transportation and housing. Her dissertation research focuses on the right to the city, the politics of fare evasion and enforcement, and social movements advocating for free fare. Her dissertation will be a mixed-methods approach to understanding why people evade the fare and the policing systems which enforce behavior on the New York City subways. This is an extension of her Master’s thesis, which examined racial bias in fare enforcement through a large-scale quantitative analysis of King County arrest data between 2015 and 2019. She aims to apply similar methods to New York City subways to examine the ways in which poverty, race, and personal ethics converge and motivate people to evade the fare.

Isis is interested in how space, material economic conditions, and public policy interact to create the sociopolitical and cultural environments we inhabit. Using asset-based community development principles, she is interested in imagining and building a future based on participatory planning and policy design. 

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