Mia White

Mia Charlene White
—Associate Director

Mia Charlene Whiteis a parent, daughter, differently-abled dreamer from Queens, currently Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies in theEnvironmental Studies Program at The New School for Public Engagement,with a co-teaching appointment at the Milano School for International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy. She identifies as a Black woman of African American and Korean descent.  Mia is an ongoing faculty-affiliate of theTishman Environment and Design Center, a 2017-18 Fellow with the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography and Social Thought (GIDEST @ The New School), and a 2018-19 Faculty Fellow with the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. She currently serves as Co-Chair of the University Faculty Senate, where she labors to build shared governance capacities across the university.  Mia has a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Political Science from the State University of NY at Stonybrook, a Master of International Affairs (Environmental Policy / Environmental Justice focus) from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and a Ph.D. in Urban Studies and Planning (Housing and Environment) from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).  Mia’s work is interdisciplinary and she situates herself among radical geographers (race geography) and anthropologists, planning/urban theorists (fugitive planning), radical sociologists/historians, and those others seeking to link social science concepts of space and race, to the humanities via art and protest.  Since joining the faculty of The New School in 2016, she has developed and teaches the following all-new courses:Environmental History, Race and Natural Resource Management;  Black Geographies;  Race, Space, and Dispossession:  An Introduction to Critical Environmental Geographies;  The Revolution will be Cooperative:  Community Land Trusts, Coops and The Commons, and Fugitive Planning.  She also mentors thesis and dissertation writers using qualitative methods in their research.  She is currently working on her first book manuscript titled Love: A Blues Epistemology from the Undercommons —an ethnographic exploration of vernacular planning resistance and everyday revolution in Brown and Black spaces, towards what she hopes to suggest as a “Theory of Love.”