[1] Atuahene is the author of We Want What's Ours: Learning from South Africa's Land Restitution Program, a 2014 ethnography of the post-apartheid land restitution program, and won the 2020 John Hope Franklin Award from the Law and Society Association for her California Law Review article "Predatory Cities," based on her 2018 ethnography of property tax assessments in Detroit.

[4][5][6] In 2016, Atuahene won a National Science Foundation grant for research sponsored by the ABF and focused on squatters in Detroit.

[16] To develop the book, Atuahene conducted an ethnographic field study of the land restitution program in post-apartheid South Africa,[17]: 1041–1042 [6] with support and institutional review from the American Bar Foundation and Chicago-Kent College of Law.

[5]: 6 The research conducted by Atuahene included interviews with land restitution claimants and government workers who administered the program.

"[6] In a review for the International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, Jonnette Watson Hamilton writes, "Atuahene's starting premise is that more than financial well-being and property were lost as a result of apartheid and the highly racialized deprivations of land in South Africa; there were harms to human dignity as well", and that Atuahene has "coined the term "dignity takings" for situations "when a state directly or indirectly destroys or confiscates property rights from owners or occupiers whom it deems to be sub persons without paying just compensation and without a legitimate public purpose.

""[16]: 131 Eleanor Marie Lawrence Brown writes in a review for Michigan Law Review that Atuahene built upon previous work by Carol M. Rose, who has examined other "extraordinary" takings, where "the state takes away property without just compensation and simultaneously makes a point about a person or a group's standing in the community of citizens.