Alycia Ellington (they/she) [pronounced: ah-lee-sha] — is an interdisciplinary qualitative researcher trained in environmental studies, geography, sociology, ethnic studies, and education. As a queer, mixed-race scholar raised in the Bay Area, she approaches research as a practice rooted in accountability, collective care, and transformative possibility. Grounded in Black geographic and abolitionist frameworks, they examine how racial capitalism, surveillance, displacement, and carceral logics shape the spatial politics of belonging and safety for Black and marginalized youth. Their current project, “Cartographies of Reclamation: Youth Place-Making, Collective Futures & the Spatial Politics of Belonging in Oakland, CA”, centers Oakland youth as producers of spatial knowledge, exploring how young people navigate, resist, and reimagine educational and community spaces shaped by state-sanctioned violence. Using relational and non-extractive qualitative methods, she studies how youth cultivate geographies of care, refusal, and collective world-making. Rather than framing schools through deficit narratives, they highlight young people as theorists of safety, belonging, and abolitionist futures. Ultimately, her work is guided by a belief that young people deserve spaces where they can show up fully, safely, and unapologetically as themselves.