Our guest speaker will be…
Dr. Ryan Thomson, Associate Professor of Rural Sociology at Auburn University’s College of Agriculture.
Dr. Ryan Thomson is a leading scholar of heirs’ property whose work focuses on identifying, measuring, and understanding the socio-economic consequences of tangled title, especially across the U.S. South and Appalachia.
His research was among the first to advance geospatial methodologies for locating heirs’ property at scale. Drawing on geospatial analysis, mixed-methods research, and applied social science, Thomson documents the human cost of clouded title and translates findings into policy-relevant tools for communities and practitioners.
Please join us to learn what heirs’ property research reveals about the scale and value of a major form of land tenure insecurity, the consequences of clouded title on intergenerational wealth and how systemic barriers to land access and economic mobility impact communities.
Dr. Ryan Thomson is Associate Professor of Rural Sociology in the College of Agriculture at Auburn University. His research, teaching, and organizing center on heirs’ property; inheritance disputes, clouded titles, involuntary land loss, deferred maintenance, and community deterioration across the Deep South.
Thomson has spent the past decade working directly alongside communities facing heirs’ property loss. He wrote his dissertation at the University of Florida while working with the Afro-Indigenous Gullah/Geechee Nation in the Lowcountry, documenting families facing displacement from predation.
In partnership with Tuskegee and Alabama A&M, he co-founded the Alabama Heirs’ Property Alliance to provide statewide resources and technical assistance. With Neighborhood Housing Services of Birmingham, he authored Holding Onto Home: Heirs’ Property in Birmingham, Alabama, produced as part of the initial NCST cohort, and provided analytic support for the middle neighborhoods hypothesis.
Thomson served as inaugural Chair of the USDA SERA-49 Multistate Project on heirs’ property and has trained more than six hundred organizers across more than a dozen states through the Southern Rural Development Center. His work has been cited in case law and covered by NBC News, ABC News, and USA Today.
