Allison Guess

Allison Guess is a Ph.D. student in Earth and Environmental Sciences (Human Geography) at the CUNY Graduate Center and a co-chair of the Africana Studies Group. Her research seeks to explain and define Black people’s specific relationships to land in the Western Hemisphere and develop the category of “Black Land.” Currently, Allison is a Communications Fellow at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College and the current Writing Fellow at Macaulay Honors College. She is the former Director of Communications at the Futures Initiative at The Graduate Center at CUNY and was the Editor of the Initiative’s newsletter from 2015-2018. Some of Guess’ scholarly work can be found published in the edited volume titled Deterritorializing/ Reterritorializing: Critical Geography of Educational Reform (2017), American Quarterly (2016), Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (2014), Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (2014). Allison holds a BA in Hispanic Languages and Literatures and a BA in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Aside from academia, Allison is a member of the Black/Land Project, a public community research/interview project that amplifies Black peoples’ relationships to land and place and she is also the former New York City founding network leader of the national Black-led environmentalist advocacy organization called Outdoor Afro. Lovingly, Allison refers to herself as an evolutionary Black whirlwind and a “geotheorist” of Black people’s relationships with Land, a concept she coined in 2014. Follow Allison on Twitter at @AllisonGuess1