Research

Faculty led-community involved projects:

The Federalism Lab: The Politics of Local Government collects data on local, state, and national government collaboration, cooperation, and, at times, opposition. The powers of local governments in the United States are designated in state constitutions, even in more autonomous "home rule" states. Our research in The Federalism Lab centers on the mechanisms for preemption, what makes a state preempt, or overrule, local policy action. Data collection efforts include roll-call votes of the Tennessee General Assembly and agenda items from the Memphis City Council and Shelby County. For more information, contact Dr. Brooke Shannon.

MAPP Memphis: Measuring Assets, People, and Places, is a pilot project examining how the boundaries used to define neighborhoods shape inequality by comparing administrative borders with resident-defined geographies in Soulsville, a historically Black neighborhood in Memphis. Urban policies and planning frameworks often rely on arbitrary units such as zip codes and census tracts that misrepresent local needs and resilience, a form of spatial bias known as the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). Through a mixed-methods design combining Participatory GIS (PGIS) and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), the project trains Soulsville youth as co-researchers to map neighborhood boundaries, document residents' oral histories, and integrate these data into the Memphis 3.0 comprehensive planning framework. This resident-authored spatial dataset will quantify how administrative misalignments distort measures of opportunity and belonging while revealing mechanisms of resilience and community identity that conventional data overlook. In doing so, the project reframes spatial definition itself as a mechanism of inequality and demonstrates a scalable, participatory model for more equitable and community-informed urban planning. For more information, contact Dr. Brenda Mathias.

Community requested projects: