Teo Wickland

PhD Granting Institution: University of California, Los Angeles  

Department: School of Geography  

College: College of Social & Behavioral Sciences

Mentor: John Paul Jones III, Ph.D.

Research Proposal: Escape from Plantations

Teo Wickland completed his Ph.D. in Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021 where he was recognized as the Outstanding Graduating Doctoral Student. Teo is currently a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Studies and an Academic Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. Teo was a recipient of many prestigious fellowships including multiple Eisenhower Transportation Fellowships, the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, the Institute of Transportation Studies Fellowship, and the Chateaubriand Fellowship.

Teo is a scholar of land relations of modernity/coloniality and abundant futures. His research is driven by his desire to promote justice, diversity, and abundant possibility—in, of and through transportation.

During his fellowship, Teo’s research will focus on the vast subject at the site of plantation transportation: infrastructures, logistics and mobilities that embed power relations, produce deracinations, and through their contingency hold promises of transformative change. Plantation transportation spans transport within and required by colonial slave plantations (slave ships, mule carts, roads, canals, barges) and the transport within and required by varied cotemporary reincarnations of the plantation (prison and commuter buses, freeways, pipelines, cargo ships).

In his letter of support, mentor Dr. John Paul Jones III, Dean of International Education and Professor of Geography, wrote, “Teo has one of the most interesting – and distinctive – scholarly profiles I’ve seen in my career. Teo earned his bachelor’s degree in Physics at Harvard and from there went on to UC Berkeley to earn two master’s degrees, one in Civil Engineering, with an emphasis on transportation engineering, and one in City and Regional Planning. His PhD studies at UCLA were also in City and Regional Planning…Clearly a scientist-theorist of his caliber is quite rare and speaks well of his long-term promise to bridge scientific, social scientific, and humanistic communities at the UA.”