Cerianne Robertson, Ph.D.

Cerianne Robertson is an urban communication and cultural studies scholar who explores how power is formed, networked, wielded, and challenged in contests over cities’ futures.

Cerianne’s work engages urban development and city storytelling, spatial and racial discourses and imaginaries, and the movements and communities organizing for social-racial-housing justice. Part of her work focuses on spectacular development projects and spectacular sports mega-events — rich sites for analysis because they intensify debate about a city’s trajectory, revealing competing values and spatial imaginaries. A complementary component of her work focuses on everyday, sustained struggles for survival, dignity, and popular power. Such struggles reveal both mechanisms of spatial and social inequality and potential pathways toward more just urban spaces.

Cerianne's book project investigates the politics of development and displacement in Los Angeles and Inglewood's stadium borderlands in the context of the region's preparations to host the Olympics in 2028.

Cerianne received a Ph.D. in 2024 from ‘the other Annenberg’ at the University of Southern California. Prior to her PhD, she worked in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as an editor and reporter for RioOnWatch, a platform that documented the impacts of that city’s sports mega-events on the region’s favelas.