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Kareem Usher

Kareem Usher

Kareem Usher

Assistant Professor

usher.21@osu.edu

Dr. Kareem M. Usher is an Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at the Knowlton School of Architecture. His academic identity can be described as a public scholar who strives to create a peaceful, just and loving world by reducing human suffering through community-engaged planning research - the co-production of knowledge between community members and faculty, with the site of an inquiry being food systems at the neighborhood scale. Dr. Usher’s research focuses on urban food systems and he engages this topic at the intersection of food access, social justice, regional governance, and community economic development. Methodologically, his work incorporates compassion as a planning approach and ‘action research’ or community-engaged scholarship. By working with communities on food systems in real places and in real-time, he has developed a body of empirical work that provides the foundation for an emergent research program at the intersections of community development, theory, and praxis. His work has spanned geographies: rural-suburban-urban, Global South-Global North, Mid-western-Southern United States; cultures and socio-economic groups: African American, Appalachian, Non-Hispanic European, and Indigenous Peoples: Belizean ethnic groups – Kriol, Garifuna, and Maya (Q’echi). Acknowledging that there remains much to know and understand in order to address ‘wicked’ social problems and effect sustainable change, Dr. Usher employs compassionate community engagement to uncover and lift up new ways of knowing – new epistemologies co-created with citizens who are the experts in their communities.