Melissa Valle

Melissa M. Valle is the Mellon Assistant Professor in Global Racial Justice in both the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University- Newark. She is also a core faculty member of the Global Urban Studies/Urban Systems PhD. program. She is currently a Princeton-Mellon/Princeton School of Public and International Affairs Fellow through the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. Her current book project, Battling for Worth: Race, Recognition, and Urban Change on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast, is under contract with Oxford University Press. It demonstrates how race becomes encoded in the value of urban space by exploring the criteria people use to determine what and who has worth, at different spatial scales, in the context of urban spatial and economic change in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Valle is the recipient of a Fulbright award to Colombia and has also completed research on Afro-descendants living in Santiago, Chile, exploring the mechanisms that lead to reduced life chances for marginalized groups and how such groups negotiate stigma perspectives that suggest their identities have been devalued.