About me
Tiana (Tee) Freeman is an advanced doctoral candidate whose research centers on Black girlhood, creative geographies, and spatial ecosystems of belonging in Worcester, MA. Her work examines how Black girls generate belonging through the ways they move, occupy, and transform space across out-of-school-time (OST) programs and city environments, creating their own landscapes of care, safety, and community across geographies. As a scholar-practitioner, she translates participatory, youth-led methodologies and Black girl-authored creative artifacts into actionable frameworks for OST systems, focusing on belonging metrics, program design, and organizational practice. Through Takeover Academy LLC, she partners with youth-serving organizations to design and evaluate systems grounded in youth epistemologies and Black girls’ spatial ways of knowing, bridging research and practice to reimagine belonging as something already produced by Black girls rather than delivered by institutions.
