Jocelyn Poe
Inspired by her work as a community planner and resident of MS, Jocelyn's work is grounded in black places as sites of struggle, resistance, and care. She is a community planner, organizer, and theorist driven by the need to understand the interplay between how places hurt and heal and the role planners and other place workers have in facilitating collective healing. Her work resonates with critical issues of justice and equity, which shape our cities and are deeply relevant to the planning field and its past, present, and future.
These experiences inform her research as she applies theory to practice in order to build a reparative praxis framework that seeks more just futures. Jocelyn engages in remixed methodologies that require transdisciplinary and creative approaches. As an educator, she teaches reparative methodologies and theories and is excited about building practical reparative strategies for future generations of planners and place workers.
Poe is the Director of the Reparative Praxis Lab and the founder and principal of SaHA Planning Studio, LLC. She earned a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Development at the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. She also has a Bachelor of Architecture from the Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Sciences at Tuskegee University and a Master of Community Planning from Auburn University.
"Planning processes often contribute to communal trauma, and communities respond with resistance in the varying ways that they can. In this fight for place, I believe we can identify strategies for care and repair that can lead to more just futures."
Academic Research/Specialty Areas
- Collaborative practice
- Community-based planning and development
- Participatory and collaborative planning
- Planning history
- Social justice and equity
- Planning theory and practice
- Reparative planning
- Social justice and equity
- Qualitative methods
Related Links
Related News
- Designed With Care: Improving Community Well-Being Through Planning
- New Fellows Expand Community-Engaged Learning Network
- ACSP's 2022 Don Schön Award for Excellence in Learning from Practice Announced
- Cornell AAP Announces Eight New Faculty Members, Including Cross-Disciplinary Social Justice Cohort
- Cornell AAP Announces New Hires Advancing Collaborative Scholarship and Creative Practice in Social Justice and Equity
Awards, Grants, and Fellowships (Selected)
- Health Policy Research Scholar Fellowship, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (2018–2022)
Exhibitions and Presentations (Selected)
- "Reparations and Planning," Urban Affairs Association Conference, Washington, DC (April 2022)
- "To Live and Die in South Central L.A." Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Conference, Virtual (November 2021)
- "Theorizing Communal Trauma: A look at the relationship between race, spatial imaginaries and place in the U.S. South," Association of Critical Heritage Studies Spring Symposium, Virtual (2021)
Publications (Selected)
- Poe, Jocelyn, Jaleesa Reed, and Racquel Nunley. "New Considerations for Sista Circle Methodology: Applications in Relation to Beauty, Femininity, and Place." Qualitative Inquiry (2024): 10778004241250071.
- Knapp, Courtney, Jocelyn Poe, and John Forester. "Repair and healing in planning." Planning Theory & Practice 23, no. 3 (2022): 425–458.
- Collective for Research and Policy, The T., Adrian N. Neely, Asia S. Ivey, Catherine Duarte, Jocelyn Poe, and Sireen Irsheid. "Building the Transdisciplinary Resistance Collective for Research and Policy: Implications for Dismantling Structural Racism as a Determinant of Health Inequity." Ethnicity & Disease 30, no. 3 (2020): 381–388.
- Piazzoni, Francesca, Jocelyn Poe, and Ettore Santi. "What Design for Urban Design Justice?" Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, (2022): 1–22.
- Poe, Jocelyn. "Theorizing communal trauma: Examining the relationship between race, spatial imaginaries, and planning in the U.S. South." Planning Theory 21, no. 1 (2021): 56–76.
