Keith Cheng

Keith is a first-year doctoral student in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan. His research explores, broadly, topics around social infrastructures, solidarity economies, anarchist planning practices, abolitionist geographies, and how technology can be used within the planning field to enable new ways of seeing, understanding, and being in the world. Fundamentally, his goal as an academic is to leverage the power of research to support and empower communities at the margins.

Prior to joining Taubman College, he completed his M.A. in Adult Education and Community Development at the University of Toronto and has worked professionally as a multimedia designer. He is involved in multiple research labs, including the International Partnership for Queer Youth Resilience (INQYR), the Queer and Trans Research Lab (QTRL), the FLOURISH Collective, and the Black Digital Humanities Lab, which he founded and co-directs with Dr. Brittany Mybrugh at Jackson State University.

In the past year, Keith has been working on two community-based participatory action research projects that are now both in the data dissemination phase. The first explores the experiences of queer youth of color in Scarborough, an eastern suburb of Toronto, Canada and where he grew up. This mixed-methods study employed arts-based digital workshops to creatively engage participants with questions around community, infrastructure (or lack thereof), and what it means to imagine a queer future for Scarborough. The other, based in Jackson, Mississippi, involved working with local students at an HBCU to explore how digital technologies can enable new relationships with physical space, particularly in relation to historical consciousness.

Outside of his research work, you can find Keith around Detroit chilling at local coffee shops, checking out new exhibits at the museums, or exploring new parts of the city with his dog Kanu.

Select Publications

• Rodricks, D.J., Cheng, K., & Charise, A. (2025). Queering on Paper: Papercraft as a Method for Social Wellness with Racialized 2SLGBTQ+ Youth in Eastern Toronto, Canada. In E. Fitzpatrick, R. Reilly, & Y. Wang (Eds.), The scholarship of making: Craft as method, as knowing, as decolonisation and connecting. [Forthcoming]
• Rodricks, D.J., Crisostomo, A., Cheng, K., & Thomson, C. (2024). A Methodology of (Un/Re)Making: A Kitchen Table Conversation with an Early Career Scholar-Educator- Practitioner Collective. Research in Drama Education (RiDE) 2067: The Futures of Drama Education and Applied Theatre and Performance 30(3). [Forthcoming]
• Petterson, A., Cheng, K., Chandra, P. (2023). “Playing with Power Tools: Design Toolkits and the Framing of Equity” in Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference. doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581490

Select Conference Presentations

• Charise, A., Cheng, K., & Rodricks, D.J. (2025, April 5). Exploring Arts-based Social Wellness with Queer of Colour Youth in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada: A Mixed-Methods Study. Health Humanities Consortium Conference 2025. Philadelphia, PA., United States of America.
• Cheng, K. & Rodricks, D.J. (2024, November 22). (Out)sideThe Downtown Core: A Mixed-Methods Study of Community Arts-Wellness Programming for 2SLGBTQ+ Youth of Colour in Scarborough, Ontario. Community-Based Research Summit 2024. Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
• Myburgh, B., Cheng, K., & Stiff, A. (2024, August 9). Digital Dialogues: Exploring Digital Humanities in HBCUs Through a Kitchen-Table Talk Approach. DH2024: Reinvention and Responsibility, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, Washington, D.C., United States of America.