Ryan Haas

This project examines how children navigate, contest, and reconfigure the racialized politics of care and belonging in a gentrifying Black neighborhood of East Austin, Texas. Through 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the George Washington Carver Branch Library—a historically Black public institution now situated in a rapidly transforming urban corridor—I explore how children’s spatial practices animate alternative imaginaries of public life under late liberal governance. Rather than treating children as passive recipients of displacement or symbolic figures within adult politics, this research attends to their everyday acts of lingering, joking, withdrawing, helping, and refusing as forms of spatial and political world-making. Drawing on participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and participatory mapping with youth, I investigate how Carver’s afterschool programming mediates tensions between racial memory and urban redevelopment, inclusion and discipline, representation and erasure. In doing so, the project contributes to anthropological debates on childhood, racial governance, and urban change by foregrounding children not only as subjects shaped by displacement, but as social actors whose actions reveal the contested terrain of public institutions, civic restructuring, and racialized care. Carver Library becomes a lens through which to understand how political life is improvised—and sometimes refused—between the stacks and the city.