Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Earth & Environmental Sciences

Advisor

Cindi Katz

Committee Members

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

María Elena Torre

Caitlin Cahill

J.T. Roane

Subject Categories

American Studies | Civic and Community Engagement | Community-Based Learning | Community-Based Research | Environmental Studies | Gender and Sexuality | Human Geography | Infrastructure | Leisure Studies | Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies | Nature and Society Relations | Physical and Environmental Geography | Place and Environment | Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies | Queer Studies | Race and Ethnicity | Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration | Urban, Community and Regional Planning | Urban Studies

Keywords

Queer & Trans Geography, Black Geographies, Queer Ecologies, Erosion, Accretion

Abstract

The People’s Beach at Jacob Riis Park on the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens, New York, is a vibrant place of queer and trans public-space placemaking—and especially Black and working class queer and trans placemaking. A distinct queer ecology emerges in the interplay of the dynamic movement of the barrier island, queer and trans—especially queer and trans Afro-diasporic—mobilities. This queer ecology, while articulated with, also defies and exceeds logics and workings of private property. In response to a convergence of pressures on Black, queer, trans, and working-class placemaking on the beach site in the 2020s, beachgoers have mobilized longstanding provisional socialities and practices of rest, play, grief, and sharing toward research, knowledge-building, stewardship, and political action. This persistence demands research methods attentive to the simultaneity of social, political, ecological, and historical contingencies. This dissertation project approaches “queer Riis” in a political economic scope of land formation, property-making, organized abandonment, and grassroots planning in the area stretching back to approximately 1900 and positions queer placemaking as building out an infrastructure toward a stability of place, even amidst landscape change. Through this, this project builds on accretion as a coastal process by which sediment builds up as a physical and dialectical opposite to erosion to offer a conceptual intervention and poetics of landscape by which accretion is, too, a political concept of coming together in simultaneously fluid and particular, provisional yet enduring, associations along the contours of organized abandonment and organized violence, only partly identifiable as recognizable political, social, or identity formations.

Download

Share

COinS