Assistant Professor; CRP Founders Fellow
Ashley Hernandez is an Assistant Professor (CRP Founders Fellow) in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill.
Before coming to UNC Chapel Hill, she was a researcher in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. She studies and teaches on topics of housing and community development, urban inequality, social movements, and race. Her dissertation is an ethnographic investigation on anti-gentrification activism and community-based organizations across the political spectrum in East Los Angeles. Her work explores how the Latinx community in East Los Angeles struggles to shape neighborhood change and formulate a Latinx right to the city, as well as the ways their larger calls to action and tactics reverberate to other neighborhoods experiencing gentrification across the United States. She is a Eugene Cota Robles Fellow and a 2020-2021 Haynes Lindley Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. She has presented her work and methodologies at the Institute of Economic Development in Delhi, India and the Laboratoire D’Urbanisme in Paris, France. She co-authored and published a report for the California Endowment titled Increasing Community Power and Health Through Community Land Trusts: A Report from Five Grassroots CLTs to illuminate the ways in which five historically black and brown communities across California were responding to the effects of the COVID-19 crisis in their respective neighborhoods. Ashley is deeply committed to studying urban inequality and working with underrepresented communities and their struggles against displacement.
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