Townsand Price-Spratlen CV

Urban sociology. Currently studying the community capacity building process. This includes: the role of grassroots organizing in desistance and post-prison reintegration success, how faith-based organizations inform health disparities and wellness outcomes, and historically, how local assets mattered during and after the Great Migration. 

I study historical and contemporary community capacity building; i.e., the means by which local area assets are brought together to improve the quality of life.  My work focuses on how community and organizational practices shape demographic, health/wellness, and justice outcomes.  In my historical work, I explore how NAACP activism and other assets of urban destinations helped shape the “Great Migration” of African Americans across the 20th century.  My contemporary work analyzes how community organizations inform faith, health, and civic engagement.  This work includes the impact of neighborhood social and physical disorder on psychosocial well-being and self-assessed health.  My forthcoming book, Reconstructing Rage: Transformative Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Peter Lang Press), is an ethnography of how a grassroots, reentry organization has nurtured sustained desistance across a generation, and built community capacity with former felons at the core of its leadership.