Kayla Thomas is a Yale sociology Ph.D. candidate whose research primarily engages with questions around belonging, precarity, and neighborhood transformation. Her dissertation research deals with how long-term residents build and maintain community among a shifting sociospatial landscape. She focuses on the ways in which residents manage and navigate ongoing neighborhood phenomena, such as gentrification, policing, and increasing reports of antisemitism and anti-Black racism. She is specifically interested in strategies for engaging with and resisting forms of ontological precarity and social death.