Gwendolyn Purifoye is an urban sociologist who specializes in ethnographic studies of social, spatial, and material experiences in public places, especially on and around public transportation. Her research projects are interdisciplinary and intersectional. At the heart of her work is understanding how the human dignity of racial minorities is undermined, and how it is regained and reimagined by the communities themselves. Her work has been published in various volumes and journals including Du Bois Review, City & Community, and Mobilities. Her current book project, Race in Motion: Public Transportation and Restricted Mobile Spaces, uses ethnographic and archival data to examine how public transportation is used to support persistent inequalities and inequities that are raced, spatial, material, social, and embodied. Her most recent research project, which is nearing conclusion, ethnographically explores how Black men and women are put in harm's way - in the form of raced and gendered surveillance, social aggression, social shunning, and workplace hazards - in and around public transportation hubs and parks in Chicago and Washington, D.C.