Demetrius Miles Murphy is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. He earned his BBA in Management Consulting and Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame and his MA in Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. His research interests lie in the areas of race and ethnicity, urban sociology, culture, mental health, and economic sociology. He focuses on flourishing, the Black class structure, resistance strategies, and Black placemaking in the Americas. He has two ongoing lines of research. One research line investigates Blackness and responses to anti-Blackness in Brazil. The latest manuscript from this line of research explores police killings and racial ideologies in Brazil using social media data. His primary line of research is his dissertation, Flourishing in LA: Making Place in an Anti-Black Metropolis. He examines where Black people feel good and how those places promote their emotional, psychological, and social well-being (i.e., flourishing).
