Darien Williams, doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Images: Adam Glanzman
Darien Williams, doctoral student in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Images: Adam Glanzman - In researching disaster recovery and marginalized populations, the PhD student seeks out people with deep knowledge of their communities. "It's such a weird sort of whiplash," Darien Alexander Williams says, about how he has felt these past weeks. "It's been very strange to go from this quarantine life, to crowds of thousands of people, to inhaling tear gas, to writing emails and answering Doodle Polls and finishing up a paper. And then going back out the next night." The third-year PhD student in the MIT Department of Urban Studies had just been formulating a dissertation topic chronicling the "messy" urban planning politics of Black Muslim organizations in Boston, when recently documented acts of police brutality ignited Black Lives Matter protests across the world. He has joined the protests, though not directly as part of his research; rather, Williams says he tries to bring his full self, including all of his identities as a young Black queer Muslim disaster researcher, into everything he does. "There's just inevitability that I will be pulled into the work, even if I didn't want to be pulled into the work that day," he says.
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