“It’s such a weird sort of whiplash,” Darien Alexander Williams says, about how he has felt these past weeks. “It’s been very strange to go from this quarantine life, to crowds of thousands of people, to inhaling tear gas, to writing emails and answering Doodle Polls and finishing up a paper. And then going back out the next night.” The third-year PhD student in the MIT Department of Urban Studies had just been formulating a dissertation topic chronicling the “messy” urban planning politics of Black Muslim organizations in Boston, when…
