jah elyse sayers (they/them) directs their creative energy toward liberatory placemaking through research, writing, artmaking, teaching, and building. you can find their writing in Wagadu, BRICLab Essays, Deem, and Society & Space Magazine. 

jah is currently a phd candidate in environmental psychology at the graduate center, cuny, and a dissertation fellow with both the center for place, culture, and politics and the institute for research on the african diaspora in the americas and caribbean. their dissertation focuses on embodied, enacted, and relational placemaking in tension with public-space planning, research, and policy, focusing on the rapidly changing landscape of people’s beach at jacob riis park (“riis,” arguably the oldest ongoing queer public space in new york city). they prioritize poetic, participatory, and insurgent methods in their research and argue against methods that conscript particular people to particular places, instead calling for attentiveness to embodied relationalities and mobilities as people make place. their research offers theories of placemaking, experimental methods of place-based study, and activated praxes of protecting a place and its constituent placemakers and methods toward liberatory ends.

they work as research associate with the place, memory & culture incubator, editorial assistant with women’s studies quarterly, adjunct instructor of urban studies at spitzer school of architecture at the city college of new york, and performance and installation artist.

they are the initiator and a member of the people’s riisearch group, a team of community-based researchers working in coordination with GLITS, Inc., to preserve histories and futures of black, indigenous, people of color, queer and trans women, and trans and non-binary people at riis.