Mauve Perle Tahat, PhD

I’m a social epistemologist, which mostly means I ask:

Who gets to know things?

Who gets believed?

And who gets left out?

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I study haunted institutions, environmental grief, strange objects, public memory, and the politics of space.

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My work lives in the overlap between scholarship, storytelling, and survival. I’m drawn to things that won’t stay buried—especially the ones we’ve paved over, abandoned, or thrown away.

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I write for kindred thinkers, students, artists, and curious outsiders. I believe the best theory is porous, a little messy, and rooted in lived experience. I believe in legacy—not the kind built on institutions, but the kind passed down in whispers, notebooks, and glowing screens.

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I’m currently finishing Plastic Affects: Spatial Narratives and Configurations of Place  (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), a book about memory, microplastics, and the feeling of staying too long. My previous book, Ecologies of Incarceration: Carceral Discard Studies in the Anthropocene (Lexington Books, 2024) is available wherever books are sold.

 

I teach in public and private spaces—sometimes in classrooms, sometimes in abandoned buildings, sometimes here, with you.