What if the work of sovereignty begins quietly, in the spaces where belonging and imagination take root?

Sovereignty has never been evenly distributed. For generations, the right to shape space, preserve knowledge, and imagine futures has been denied to Black and Indigenous communities, immigrants, working-class families, and anyone outside carefully guarded centers of power. When "home" doesn't mean safety (physically, emotionally, financially), identity formation itself becomes disrupted.

This inequity isn't accidental. It's built into a mechanistic worldview that treats people and places as interchangeable parts in a machine demanding infinite growth on a finite planet. This philosophy fueled the industrial age and Western economic expansion, but it runs on extraction: of natural resources and of human labor. It denies a fundamental truth: that both people and planet operate as complex adaptive systems, networks of interconnected relationships that can't be reduced to mechanical inputs and outputs. The Sovereign Spaces Project emerges from this understanding.

My work bridges lived experience with rigorous theory, drawing on complexity science, environmental psychology, spatial justice, and community-based design, to explore how communities can reclaim their sovereign right to shape space and story. Using autoethnographic and speculative methods, I examine how we might shift from mechanical problem-solving to supporting emergence, honoring cultural memory, and building what the UN calls truly sustainable systems: those that "meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

I'm here to do the work of knitting together insights across disciplines (environmental capital, human capital, economic capital) and planting seeds for real change. Design, with its spatial curiosity, narrative power, and social welfare commitments, becomes the vessel through which we can collectively de-silo our linear systems and network them toward justice.

Gallery

This is a collection of the images I've taken from exhibitions and my own related work, examining principles across geography, place identity, and Afrofuturism.

The exhibits on view are featured at:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, 2025

The Smithsonian National African American Museum of Art & Culture:
Power of Place, 2025