Biography
Shana M. griffin is a Black feminist activist, researcher, sociologist, artist, abolitionist, and mother. Her practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, activist-centered, and decolonial—existing across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, digital humanities, and land-use planning and within movements challenging urban displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. Shana is a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia public history project tracing the geographies of Black displacement in New Orleans; author of Theirs Was a Movement Without Marches: Black Women in Public Housing, a feminist public history project documenting the hidden narratives and organizing efforts of low-income Black women living in public housing; and founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist research, art, and activist initiative. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Sociology and undergraduate degrees in History and Sociology.
Research
DISPLACED is an interactive feminist and multimedia public history initiative tracing the geographies of Black displacement, dislocation, confinement, and disposability in land-use planning, housing policy, carceral control, and urban development in New Orleans and beyond with counter-narratives of Black refusal, rupture, protest, and possibilities. Beginning with the formation of New Orleans as a colonial enterprise and carceral landscape, DISPLACED chronicles the institutionalization of racial violence in spatial segregation, discriminatory housing policies, confinement, development schemes, and environmental degradation that reproduce systemic practices of racial and gender inequality, social exclusion, economic marginalization, and policing.
DISPLACED explores how housing policies and spatial configurations become sites of everyday violence and locations of resistance and possibilities for reimagining space-making as an oppositional framework to displacement while engaging in abolitionist strategies that value Black life. Using archival research, historical images, maps, ephemera, found objects, original artwork, photography, personal narratives, communal stories of resistance, and public education, DISPLACED integrates critical research methods with activism and socially engaged art preserving archives of public history, documenting violent policies of erasure, memorializing acts of Black refusals, and reimagining spatial relations. DISPLACED works exist in the form of a walking tour, visual timeline, lecture series, and future interactive website, atlas, and exhibition.
