Kayla Edgett

Kayla Edgett is a 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, and Atlanta Studies.

Her dissertation research utilizes an extended case study of Atlanta, GA, USA to investigate how carceral spaces have been developed and contested within the development of the city from the late 19th through the early 21st centuries. Through interviews and counter archival research, the project further asks how community organizers are building abolition geography and abolitionist infrastructures within and against spaces of incarceration and policing in Atlanta in the first decades of the 21st century. Ultimately, the research asks how centering the production of carceral space and its contestations changes our understanding of neoliberal urban governance and racial capitalism. 

In addition to her research, Kayla is an instructor of record for Introduction to World Geography (Geog 1130), co-chair of the Geography Graduate Student Association, and advisory board member of Atlanta Studies. Beyond academia, she engages in public scholarship and community organizing for urban justice.