Alesia Montgomery

Biography

Alesia Montgomery is an Assistant Professor in UCLA’s Department of African American Studies and at UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability (IoES). An ethnographer, Montgomery studies the social and environmental justice concerns of low-income, racialized communities. Her book, Greening the Black Urban Regime: The Culture and Commerce of Sustainability in Detroit, focuses on battles over the aims and strategies of green redevelopment. Her publications also include articles in the International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, City & Community, Ethnography, Antipode, Sociological Perspectives, and Global Networks.

Currently, Montgomery is studying (1) the politics and consequences of water insecurity in low-income, racialized communities and (2) constructions of political, cultural, and research bridges across communities to evaluate, re-imagine, and rebuild connections with water. Montgomery’s areas of research and teaching expertise span urban studies, environmental sociology, sociology of technology, race/class/gender/sexuality, social theory, and qualitative methods. She is involved in collaborations across institutions to develop new methods and tools for gathering, analyzing, preserving, and sharing qualitative data about environmental problems, in ways that further the rigor of research and its accessibility to communities. As part of this work, she serves on the Research Advisory Board for the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) at Syracuse University.

Montgomery holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Political Science from UC Irvine. She was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley, and a Rockefeller Graduate Summer Internship in Womanist Studies at the University of Georgia.