Thesis Proposal Process

Crafting the proposal for my thesis, Criminalized Landscape, was an intensive research process entailing multiple methods to understand space, time, and problem.

I visited various neighborhoods around Oakland, taking photographs and drawing on the spot, while collaging back in the studio.

I mapped police stops, arrests, race, and redlined neighborhoods, to understand how history impacted the criminalization of black and brown people in Oakland.

I overlaid redlined neighborhoods onto property values to understand how history impacted the disenfranchisement of black and brown people in Oakland.

I examined Oakland police demographics to see how the outsider views are negatively imposed onto Oakland’s residents.

The result left me with a proposal to understand the criminalized landscape, which I later came to define as:

A criminalized landscape is reified in the imaginations and conceptions of the public, as a place where criminal activity may or may not actually occur and is a place where control mechanisms are instituted as a result. It is spatial with definitive, yet varied, physical attributes.