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, The Trophallaxis Study Group, Deem, and Society & Space Magazine. 

jah is currently a phd candidate in environmental psychology, a sub-area of earth & environmental sciences at the graduate center, cuny, and a dissertation fellow with both the center for place, culture and politics (cpcp) and the institute for research on the african diaspora in the americas and caribbean (iradac). in their work, they explore how a black queer politics of place and memory pushes on dominant concepts of place and identity. their dissertation focuses on queer and trans, black, indigenous, and people of color’s 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 in neponsit, queens. 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. this 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 a research associate with the place, memory & culture incubator, editorial assistant with women’s studies quarterly (new york, ny), copyeditor, adjunct instructor, 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 queer histories and futures at the people’s beach at jacob riis park in neponsit, queens.