Laura Harjo

Laura Harjo is a Mvskoke scholar and an associate professor teaching Indigenous Planning, Community Development, and Indigenous Feminisms.  She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in geography, while also tracking through the American Studies and Ethnicity doctoral program, and her scholarly inquiry is at the intersection of geography and critical ethnic studies with “community” as an analytic focus. Harjo’s research and teaching centers on three areas: imbuing complexity to Indigenous space, and place; Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives and anti-violence; and community-based knowledge production. She is the author of Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (University of Arizona Press, 2019), which employs Mvskoke epistemologies, and Indigenous feminisms to grapple with a community praxis of futurity.   Prior to joining OU, she taught at the University of New Mexico for eight years in Community and Regional Planning where she participated in foundation building work for the Indigenous Design and Planning Institute and the Indigenous Planning concentration. She has served as a civil rights research fellow with the Advancement Project in Washington, DC. There she worked in an attorney/researcher partnership with civil rights expert Donita Judge, Esq. and researched and spatially analyzed civil rights issues in Florida, Texas, and New Orleans related to voter protection, inclusive community development, and the prison industrial complex-school to prison pipeline.  She currently serves on the board of directors for the Indian Land Tenure Foundation.

Projects:

• Abundant Intelligences CoLAB