Kayland Arrington

I'm interested in where race and ethnicity literally come from — in the sense of geography. My research looks at how racial and ethnic identity gets built through place: the neighborhoods we're raised in, the cities we move through, and the countries and diasporas we come from. My dissertation followed multiethnoracial Latino Atlantans in a city with a distinctly Black-centered racial landscape, and what I found was pretty concrete: where people lived, who their neighbors were, and which neighborhoods they had access to changed how they identified and how they were identified by others. 

Before coming to academia, I spent close to a decade working in public health, neighborhood equity, and housing, which left me with a lasting conviction that sociology only matters when it actually explains people’s lived experiences. That's the thread that connects my research to my teaching: I want students leaving my classroom with tools that help them make sense of their own lives and the world around them. I teach courses on urban life and city space, at both global and local scales. 

Introductory Sociology is a particular favorite of mine to teach though because it's usually the first time students realize the things they've always taken for granted — race, family, work, cities — were actually built, and could be built differently.