Darien Alexander Williams Joins BUSSW as Assistant Professor
Darien Alexander Williams will join Boston University School of Social Work (BUSSW) in July 2023 as an assistant professor in the School’s Macro Department. Williams’s expertise in climate and environmental justice will greatly expand the BUSSW’s focus on these issues as climate change’s impact on communities continues to grow.
Williams focuses on racial justice and community organizing by exploring how marginalized communities impact the natural and built environments. He studies how these groups recover, adapt, and rebuild themselves after catastrophes. His research also examines the history of land use planning as it intersects with the criminal legal system, and how Black urban planners dismantle white supremacist spaces.
In 2023, Williams was a BUSSW Emerging Scholar, a program that champions the work of those who are underrepresented in academia. At the program’s colloquium, he shared how climate impacts the incarcerated population and ways that abolitionist organizing can interrupt carceral infrastructure. In addition, his recently published paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association, titled “The Properties of Whiteness: Land Use Regulation and Anti-Racist Futures,” examines how land use regulations uphold white supremacist structures.
Williams earned his PhD at MIT in Urban Studies & Planning, where he wrote his dissertation on “Locating a Black Planning Tradition and Spatializing Black Nationalism.” He also holds a master’s degree in City & Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a bachelor of arts in Sociology from the University of Florida.