Demetrius Miles Murphy
Traveler.
Storyteller.
Sociologist.
I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology and African & African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. As an urban and economic sociologist of race and culture, I examine how Black communities across the Americas use social infrastructure, placemaking, new media, and ethnoracial economies to cultivate flourishing. I am currently completing two book projects that draw on ethnographic, digital, and relational methods. My first book, Black Flourishing: Why Gathering Matters in a Fragmented Black Metropolis, develops a sociological theory of flourishing, showing how everyday gathering fosters belonging, well-being, and community in an era of Black dispersal. In my second book, Affirming Blackness: Race-Making and Racism in Digital Brazil, I offer a theory of affirmative race-making to explain how Afro-Brazilians reauthor a media world saturated with Black death and reclaim Black life. My work has appeared in Urban Studies, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Gender, Work & Organization, and Contexts. Across my research, I advance a sociology of Black flourishing, an agenda organized around a single question: how does Black life flourish in a world structured by anti-Blackness? More than the absence of harm, I treat Black flourishing as a collective achievement of relationships, institutions, and cultural practices that enable Black communities to develop fulfilling and meaningful lives.