Public Spaces

Unlike a wide range of urban studies that tend to focus only on urban social problems created by social policies, Dr. Purifoye uses public transportation and public spaces to illuminate how material and political arrangements shape racialized and classed experiences and shows how people resist and reimagine them. Further, her work presents the argument that if public transportation has played a vital role in the problem of obdurate racism in the United States’ metropolitan regions, then with doable changes, it can also be used as part of the solution to design a more racially and economically equitable landscape.

Public Transportation

Dr. Purifoye’s first major research project used face-to-face and ethnographic observations to investigate how the materiality of buses, trains, and waiting areas on Chicago’s public transportation shaped Blacks and Latinx’s access to the city, enactments of racism by other riders, and experiences of fear and abandonment. Four peer-reviewed papers have been published from this work thus far. She has expanded this work to Washington, D.C. and Newark, NJ.

She also works alongside various transit equity networks and community organizations on efforts to secure transit equity across the city.