Kerry Mills

BS 2024 Technical Writing, Environmental and Sustainability Studies Additional Major

Kerry became interested in urban scholarship and environmental justice in her home city, Yonkers. She cultivated a love and curiosity for community work in particular during her time at a local nonprofit, Groundwork Hudson Valley. In college, her research focused on how communities articulate environmental crises and modes of placemaking. She has closely examined the Pittsburgh region not only as a (post)industrial archive and landscape but also as a place where people are introducing environmental policies and concepts like land banking and embodied activism at multiple scales.

The ESS major pushed Kerry to consider different sets of vocabularies, concepts, and angles concerning the environment- even down to the word 'environmental.' Some of her favorite classes were from the College of Fine Arts within architecture and design. These fields were always of interest to her, but she didn't realize that each had such rich discourses on environmental ideas. She simultaneously explored the fundamentals of these fields while also broadening her interests in industrial pollution, modes of resistance, and participatory research.

She is working on the Taking Back the Air project, a collaboration between Braddock and CMU's School of Architecture, led by Professor Nida Rehman and Morgan Newman. The project is focused on "how spatial design pedagogy and research can engage in interpretive, collaborative, and community-centered approaches to weave together the complex histories, political ecologies, material effects, modes of resistance, and everyday experiences of toxic systems to help shape a better world." (1) As a graduate research assistant, she visits physical and virtual archives, synthesizes themes, and participates in community gatherings centered on atmospheric justice and citizenship. Her main task is helping build an Archive of Air—a reconceptualized, ongoing, broadly usable collection capturing the "sociomaterial entanglements of air" in the region (2). Through this work, she is delving deeper into what constitutes ownership and narrative, while interrogating power dynamics within the conceptual (A)rchive.

After graduation, Kerry will begin her master's degree in city planning at MIT. She is joining the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, which aims to "prepare leaders to plan, design, and create communities and places that are racially, economically, and environmentally just." (3) She hopes to continue to learn and engage with communities in realizing environmental impacts and futures."

References:
(1) SOM Foundation, "2022 Research Prize, Taking Back the Air: Collective Learning, Advocacy, and Design for a Healthy Environment", https://somfoundation.com/fellow/nida-rehman/
(2) SOM Foundation, "2022 Research Prize, Taking Back the Air: Collective Learning, Advocacy, and Design for a Healthy Environment", https://somfoundation.com/fellow/nida-rehman/
(3) MIT DUSP, "About, Mission and Guiding Principles." https://dusp.mit.edu/about