Mia Karisa Dawson is a scholar, community organizer, and writer. She is a 2023-2024 recipient of the University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Department of History and the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. She studies geographies of race, property, and policing that structure cities alongside abolitionist practices of direct action, mutual aid, and autonomy that revolutionize urban space. As research partner with Decarcerate Sacramento, she contributes to a broad coalition of efforts to end policing and incarceration in California and beyond. Mia has also worked in the field of Public Health with the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program. In this capacity, she collaborated on the development of community-based violence interruption programs and alternative first response systems. With a background in environmental justice, she has collaborated with the UC Davis Center for Regional Change to study disparities in air and water quality in rural and urban California, contributing to policy recommendations and interventions.

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Mia’s work has been published in journals including EPD: Society and Space, Frontiers in Public Health, and Water Alternatives. She has also collaborated on reports published through the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and the UC Davis Center for Regional Change. Her work has been supported by organizations including the Mellon Research Initiative on Racial Capitalism, the UC Santa Cruz Visualizing Abolition program, the Society of Women Geographers, the American Association of Geographers, the Mellon Public Scholars Program and the University of Georgia Community Mapping Lab. In all her scholarly and community efforts, she honors a legacy of Black social movement that enables her work and fuels her commitments to political education, mutual aid, and capacity-building through coalition.

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