Mia Charlene White (she/her), PhD (first generation) is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at The New School where she teaches courses on race and space to students pursuing degrees in wide-ranging fields including urban and environmental studies; design and urban ecologies; race, philosophy and historical studies; and sustainability management.  Hailing from Queens, NY, Mia lives with disability, is a mom of two, and identifies as a Black woman of African American and Korean descent.  Mia’s in-progress manuscript on community land trusts and reparations contributes to the literature on blues epistemology and reparative planning as theories of spatial belonging that build a language for future-building at the intersection of racial, climate, and housing justice.

 

Mia completed her PhD in Urban Planning at MIT with focus on housing and community development; her Master of International Affairs at Columbia University with focus on environmental policy and human rights; and her Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology at SUNY Stony Brook, with minors in political science and environmental studies.  She was a 2023 Mellon Faculty Fellow for Inclusive Faculty Excellence, and is a current Mellon Faculty Mentor and a Faculty Fellow with the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy.  She also serves as Associate Director the Tishman Environment and Design Center and is a Faculty Affiliate with the Laboratory for Urban Spatial & Landscape Research. Mia’s teaching has been recognized with a university-wide award for student-centered, justice-oriented, trauma-informed universal course design. She regularly presents at conferences such as the American Association of Geographers, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, the American Studies Association, and the Urban Affairs Association.

 

Further to her commitment to public engagement, Mia is a co-founding member of the BIPOC Planners Collective (now an affinity group of the Planners Network) that supports professional planners of color seeking mutual study spaces;  she is an appointed official of the South Orange Village Zoning Board of Adjustment, in South Orange, NJ;  she is an appointed member of the NJ Reparations Council’s Environmental Justice Committee, and she is the elected Vice-Chair of the Black Geographies Speciality group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), where she also serves on the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) committee.  Her JEDI work in particular allows her to work to support faculty across the country in their commitments to the structural, historical, and spatial study of race, whatever their particular spatial foci (human, environmental, and physical geography).  Prior to academia, Mia worked in social justice philanthropy as a program officer supporting social, racial and environmental justice at the Ford Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, and the Ms. Foundation for Women.  Mia regularly leads publicly oriented teach-ins on blues epistemologies, critical race theory, critical environmental humanities, anti-racism, and reparative planning practices. She has recently explored the praxis of environmental/social justice, healing, and the arts through partnerships with institutions such as ValleyArts, the Climate Museum, the Asian American Arts Alliance (A4), the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), the Contemporary Freudian Society, the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, and the Washington School of Psychiatry.