ABOUT THE FOUNDER




Dr. Andrea Roberts

Dr. Andrea Roberts (https://andrearobertsphd.com/) is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and an Associate Director of the Center for Housing & Urban Development at Texas A&M University and a Center for Heritage Conservation Fellow. She is also the founder of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project (www.thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com ), a research & social justice initiative documenting placemaking history and grassroots preservation practices in the African Diaspora. She brings to her scholarship twelve years’ experience in community and economic development throughout the US, including with the City of Houston and Philadelphia.Her teaching and scholarship leverage various methodologies to make marginalized groups’ endangered places more visible and relevant to planning scholars, policymakers, and practitioners, including ethnography, action research, and digital humanities. Dr. Roberts has written peer-reviewed articles on African American placemaking history and practice, digital engagement, black feminist planning history, intersectionality, and preservation policy. She is currently writing a book about Black historic preservation practice. The Urban Affairs Association recently recognized her Texas Freedom Colony Atlas & Study (http://bit.ly/txfcpatlastwo), a statewide countermapping and urban humanities project, with the 2019 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Honorable Mention Award. She is also a 2020 Visiting Scholar at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Dr. Roberts is a 2019 recipient of a National Trust African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund grant and is a 2020 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow.   
From 2016 to 2017, Andrea was an Emerging Scholar Fellow at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin School of Architecture. She holds a Ph.D. in Community and Regional Planning with a specialization in historic preservation and African Diaspora Studies from The University of Texas at Austin (UT) (2017), an M.A. in Government Administration from the University of Pennsylvania (2006), and a BA in Political Science from Vassar College (1996). 




Topics/Research Areas
  • African American Studies 
  • Cultural Studies 
  • Social Theory 
  • Diaspora Studies 
  • Community Development & Revitalization 
  • Cultural Landscapes 
  • Historic Preservation Policy & Social Inclusion
  • Participatory Action Research 
  • Planning History & Theory 
  • Grassroots Movements 
  • Public Finance & Management 
  • Public History 
  • Rural/Unincorporated Area Planning 

Recent Publications

PEER-REVIEWED
Andrea Roberts (2020). "The End of Bootstraps and Good Masters: Fostering Social Inclusion through Counternarrative Creation" 
Publisher's Website

 Sletto, B., Stiphany, K., Futrell Winslow, J., Roberts, A., Torrado, M., Reyes, A., Reyes, A., Yunda, J., Wirsching, C., Choi, K. and Tajchman, K., 2020. Demystifying Academic Writing in the Doctoral Program: Writing Workshops, Peer Reviews, and Scholarly Identities. 
Publisher's Website

 Andrea Roberts. 2020. “Haunting As Agency” 
Publisher's Website

 A. Roberts & M. Matos (2020). "Adaptive liminality: Bridging and bonding social capital between urban and rural Black meccas"
Publisher's Website

 Andrea Roberts (2020). Count the Outside Children! Kinkeeping as Preservation Practice Among Descendants of Texas’ Freedom Colonies
Publisher's Website 

 Andrea Roberts (2019). “Until the Lord Come Get Me, It Burn Down, Or the Next Storm Blow It Away”: The Aesthetics of Freedom in African American Vernacular Homestead Preservation
Publisher's Website

 A. Roberts, & M. J. Biazar (2018). "Black Placemaking in Texas: Sonic and Social Histories of Newton and Jasper County Freedom Colonies"
Publisher's Website 

 A. Roberts & G. Kelly (2018). “Remixing as Praxis: Arnstein’s Ladder through the Grassroots Preservationist’s Lens”
Publisher's Website

 Andrea Roberts (2018). “Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2018). “Performance as place preservation: The role of storytelling in the formation of Shankleville Community’s Black counterpublics”
Publisher’s website 

 Jennifer Minner, Andrea Roberts, Michael Holleran & Joshua Conrad (2018). “A Smart City Remembers its Past: Citizens as Sensors in Survey and Mapping of Historic Places”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2017). “The Farmers’ Improvement Society and the Women’s Barnyard Auxiliary of Texas: African American Community Building in the Progressive Era.”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2016). “What’s Missing from Black Counternarratives to Donald Trump”
Publisher’s website 

 Jennifer Minner, Michael Holleran, Andrea Roberts & Joshua Conrad (2015). “Capturing Volunteered Historical Information: Lessons from Development of a Local Government Crowdsourcing Tool.”
Publisher’s website 

 ESSAYS, OPINION, FEATURE
Andrea Roberts (2018).  "A city in Texas discovered a mass grave of prison laborers. So what should it do with the bodies?"
Publisher’s website
 Andrea Roberts (2018). "Sugar Land: Treat the mass grave of black prisoners discovered in Texas with respect"
Publisher's website

 Andrea Roberts (2018). " Land Mass Grave: Texas City Finds Burial Site of Black Prison Laborers”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2018). “A Texas city discovered a mass grave of prison laborers. What should it do with the bodies?”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2018). “Analysis: Why Texas should brace to hear about more mass graves”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2018). “The Mass Grave Beneath a Texas Suburb”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2018).  The Texas Freedom Colonies Study & Project
Publisher's website

 Andrea Roberts (2018). “Portals to Freedom, or Researching in Limbo Time,” Platform: Convergent Voices, A Journal of the UT Austin School of Architecture’, Ed. Nichole Wiedemann and Charlton Lewis

 Brand, A., Brown, Davis, L, Ford, M., Hood, W., Lopez, S., Roberts, A., Robles Jr., J. (2017). “Conversation 030317” Platform: Convergent Voices, A Journal of the UT Austin School of Architecture’, Ed. Nichole Wiedemann and Charlton Lewis

 Andrea Roberts (2017). “When Does It Become Social Justice? Thoughts on Intersectional Preservation Practice”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2017). “Documenting and Preserving Texas Freedom Colonies”
Publisher’s website 

 Anna Brand & Andrea Roberts (2016). “Commentary: Better Communities Require Better-Educated Planners”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2017). “Homeplace: Identity, Place, and Planning”. Reading List
Publisher’s website

 BOOK REVIEW
Andrea Roberts (2017). “Book Review: Black Georgetown remembered: A history of its black community from the founding of “The Town of George” in 1751 to 4 the present day”
Publisher’s website 

 CREATIVE NON-FICTION
Andrea Roberts (2018). “Arrivals: 1930, 1964” from What’s the New News, Issue 1
Publisher’s website 
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2018). “The Poetics of Black Imagination” from What’s the New News, Issue 2
Publisher’s website 
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2017). “Old Developments: Sovereign Spaces Reclaimed”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2015). “Sacred Forest, Piney Veil: Black Landscapes of Deep Texas”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts (2015). “Critical Sankofa Planning-Mobilizing Texas Freedom Colony Memories”
Publisher’s website 

 Andrea Roberts. (2009) “An Epistle to the Revolutionary Bible,” from Medina, T., & Rivera, L. R. (Eds.).  Bum rush the page: A def poetry jam. Broadway Books.

Comments

Post a Comment