CEE Seminar: Exclusionary Environments – How Racism and Anti-Poverty Prejudice Manifest in Architecture and Infrastructure

Abstract: While attacks on the ideology of inclusion abound, it's easy to miss the ways that our built environments have abandoned inclusion as a principle, too. This presentation will focus on how ideologies like anti-poor prejudice, ableism, racism and institutional neglect manifest in hostile architecture, the decimation of socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods for utilitarian building projects, like parking decks and lots, and dangerous infrastructural decline. Part of a larger effort to explore and interrogate overlapping themes of environmental justice, gender studies, and civil and environmental engineering, this lecture will invite participants to approach familiar landscapes they navigate for work, school, routine and recreation with renewed scrutiny. By bridging the gap between engineering and the humanities, this talk will demonstrate how discrimination is built into our physical environment, how this reflects the neoliberal privatization of public space, and how structures and policies can reinforce exclusionary ideologies in the United States and abroad. 

Bio: Little is a 2024-2025 UC Underrepresented Scholars Fellow, assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies, and an affiliate faculty member in the Culture and Theory Program at UC Irvine. She joined the faculty at UCI in 2021 and is a proud alumna of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, The Ohio State University, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Spelman College and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Program. Themes of Black feminism, Black sexuality studies, pop culture, literary studies and interrogations of sexual violence connect Little’s research, publications, presentations and teaching. She is passionate about feminist pedagogy, media literacy and the teaching of writing. Read some of her work: See “Being Toward Trauma: Theorizing Post-Violence Sexuality,” published in Rejoinder: An Online Journal Published by the Institute for Research on Women. Her chapter, "Trauma and Arousal in the Archive: Black Women's Sexuality, Gloria Naylor, and Bailey's Cafe," is part of the forthcoming Critical Essays on Gloria Naylor anthology (University of Mississippi Press).