Caitlin Cahill

Caitlin Cahill, Associate Professor of Urban Geography & Politics and co-coordinator of the Social Justice/Social Practice Minor at Pratt Institute.

Caitlin Cahill is a community-based urban and youth studies scholar, environmental psychologist, and organizer from New York City. She is grateful to collaborate with communities of change-makers to co-create a more livable, just, caring, and free world for all of us.

Caitlin’s participatory praxis and research focus on the everyday intimate experience and struggle against racial capitalism as it concerns the financialization of housing, gentrification, immigration, education, and state violence. Recent projects include community engagement for the Housing SLC 5 year housing plan and anti-displacement plan Thriving in Place in Utah, and the exhibition Re:Play at the Center for Architecture. Critical participatory research projects include the Emancipatory Urban Futures project; the Bushwick Action Research Collective, Growing Up Policed, in partnership with the Public Science Project and Make the Road New York. In Salt Lake City, Utah Caitlin co-founded the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective, an intergenerational social justice think tank led by the urgent concerns of young people.

Caitlin’s work has been published widely in interdisciplinary journals including: Area; Cultural Geographies; Environment & Planning A; City & Society; Gender, Space & Culture; ACME Journal of Radical Geography; Environment & Planning C: Politics & Space,  Journal of Youth Studies, and The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, among others, and edited collections including Transcultural Cities; The Gentrification Reader; A Companion to Social Geography; and Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion.  Committed to interdisciplinary, engaged scholarship, Caitlin received several awards for her public scholarship including a special recognition from the ACLU for her work with young people on educational rights & immigration; the “Speaking Truth to Power Award for Excellence in Collaborative Research” from the Urban Research-Based Action Network (URBAN); the Gender, Place & Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Professorship of Feminist Geography; and several Taconic Fellowship awards from the Pratt Center for Community Development.  Currently, Caitlin is an editor at Metropolitics, and on the editorial boards of Community Development, Children’s Geographies, and Curriculum Inquiry.  Caitlin completed her doctorate in Environmental Psychology from the City University of New York, Graduate Center.

B.A., Middlebury College; M.A., Hunter College; M.Phil., Ph.D., The Graduate Center, CUNY.