Kayla Edgett is Ph.D. candidate in Geography at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on urban carceral geographies, racial capitalism, and organized resistance in the US South. She primarily engages qualitative methods to co-produce knowledge with and for those struggling against state and economic violence. Her work has been published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and the City, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, and Atlanta Studies.

Her dissertation, titled “Policing Capital: The Production of Carceral Space, Racialized Uneven Geographies, and Resistance in Atlanta,” investigates how policing has produced the racialized uneven geographies of Atlanta as the city has grown from a small colonial settlement into a world city. Drawing on archival research and qualitative analysis, she illustrates how state actors and capitalists cooperated to expand carceral infrastructure both to carry out the ongoing “mundane” background conditions for accumulation and to reinforce their own hegemony in response to the threat of Black resistance. Through ethnographic observations, document analysis, and interviews, she also examines strategies of recent social movements against police violence to understand how abolitionists are organizing in a city that has seen heated contestations over policing in recent years. 

In addition to her research, Kayla is an instructor of record for Introduction to World Geography (G1130), was co-chair of the Geography Graduate Student Association (2024 - 2025), and currently serves as an advisory board member of Atlanta Studies, a reviewer for Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning D, and Journal of Urban Affairs, and the Graduate Student Representative of the Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. Beyond academia, she engages in public scholarship and grassroots organizing for urban justice.