Brooklyn Northcross is a PhD student in the combined program in Sociology and Black Studies at Yale University. Her research explores how Black working-class communities resist displacement and reimagine belonging through creative placemaking, with a particular focus on her hometown of Detroit. She is interested in how urban redevelopment, gentrification, and the commodification of Blackness shape and are challenged by everyday practices of community building and protest. She is eager to deepen her exploration between race, space, power, and resistance in segregated urban environments, aiming to illuminate the grassroots strategies that hold Black communities down.