Merrit Corrigan / Anthropology
Graduate Student Researcher
September 2019 – March 2020mcorrigan@gradcenter.cuny.eduMerritCorrigan on Twitter
Project: Pothole Citizenship: Mapping from the Ground Up in Jackson, Mississippi
Merrit Corrigan is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology and a Digital Videography Fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She holds a B.A. (2015) in Anthropology and Religious Studies from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. She is currently teaching Urban Justice and Ethnography at John Jay College and serves as a New York City coordinator for the International Honors Program: Cities in the 21st Century. Prior to her studies at the Graduate Center, Merrit worked for Springboard To Opportunities, organizing with residents living in affordable housing communities in Mississippi.
Her research interests include inequality, race, infrastructure, and social movements. Her future dissertation work will examine how institutional politics of paving and contemporary strategies of resistance centered on potholes help to re-make imaginaries about race, equity, and urban space in the southern United States. At the New Media Lab, she is working on developing a public mapping project to collect and share pothole stories. By making a site where Jackson residents can collectively explore and describe road conditions, she hopes to better understand the stratified social consequences of infrastructure built for automobility as well as explore the ways road conditions are politicized.