Archive
Abolishing the frontier: (De)colonizing ‘public’ education
In this paper, Nikki Luke and I are working through how to reconcile the history of the university we work at while thinking about how folks working at institutions of higher education can push toward decolonizing public education.
ABSTRACT In this paper, we situate the public university as a frontier where structures of settler colonialism, racialization, and citizen formation are both created and contested. We use the historical- geographical position of the University of Georgia, the first public land grant university chartered in the United States, to consider the broader implications of the settler-native-slave triad in the history of public higher education. We use these historical insights to expand upon W. E. B. Du Bois’ notion of abolition democracy and Indigenous discussions of decolonization. We animate the possibilities of abolition democracy informing public higher education through three interventions that question the ways in which people within public institutions of higher education can destabilize and work to democratize the systems that enclose land, labor, and education as private property.
The Antinomies of Nature and Space
This is the opening essay to the inaugural issue of the new journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space that I help edit with the other three authors of the essay.
Here is a brief excerpt:
“This editorial introduces and inaugurates EPE. In what follows, we sketch some of the varied approaches to nature–society scholarship that the journal aims to draw together, distilling some key insights from the literature of the past several decades, while also highlighting key imperatives and ways forward to make progress on these themes and concerns. We are cognizant that there is no way to comprehensively map all of the currents of research and thinking that will allow us to engage with the range of nature– society challenges and questions we currently face. We are hopeful that neglected and newly imagined approaches will be brought to our attention as we work collectively on this journal in the coming years.”
The Enduring Struggle for Social Justice and the City
This is a substantive introductory essay I co-wrote with three incredibly smart scholars that kicks off the Annals special issue I edited that explores contemporary investigations into Social Justice and the City.
Here is an excerpt:
“What follows in this article is an effort to trace the genealogy of urban social justice within the Annals to understand its origins since the journal’s first publication in 1911 and gesture at where it might be going. To frame the articles that follow, we work through the archives of the Annals starting with the first published issue, mapping changes in the definition of social justice in three cuts. In the first section, we consider the political discussions of justice and injustice up to the radical turn in the discipline that prefigured what would become social justice as a dominant theme of investigation in geography. We then show, in selected ways, the rapid theoretical development of social justice in its variegated forms after the turn up to this special issue. Over time, we note how the empirical emphasis of articles widens to consider a broad range of geographies, identities, and political aims with a greater preponderance of specifically urban studies. Third, we discuss the ways in which articles published in the Annals have treated “the city” and urban geographical processes more broadly. Following this deeper context, we offer some summary of the twenty six special issue articles. The shift across the journal’s disciplinary history is quite extraordinary, with much of the early research drawing from racist, sexist, colonial, and environmentally determinist thought and transitioning into much more socially engaged and progressive, sometimes radical, scholarship.”
Racial Coastal Formation: Placing Race in the Making of Vulnerability to Sea-Level Rise
Abstract:
The United States’ deeply racialized history currently operates below the surface of contemporary apolitical narratives on vulnerability mitigation and adaptation to sea-level rise. As communities, regulatory agencies, and policy-makers plan for rising seas, it is important to recognize the landscapes of race and deep histories of racism that have shaped the socio-ecological formations of coastal regions. If this history goes unrecognized, what we label colorblind adaptation planning is likely to perpetuate what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” of environmental racism, characterized by policies that benefit some populations while abandoning others. By colorblind adaptation planning, we refer to vulnerability mitigation and adaptation planning projects that altogether overlook racial inequality—or worse dismiss its systemic causes and explain away racial inequality by attributing racial disparities to non-racial causes. We contend that responses to sea-level rise must be attuned to racial difference and structures of racial inequality. In this article, we combine the theory of racial formation with the geographical study of environmental justice and point to the ways racial formations are also environmental. We examine vulnerability to sea-level rise through the process of racial coastal formation on Sapelo Island, Georgia, specifically analyzing its deep history, the uneven racial development of land ownership and employment, and barriers to African American participation and inclusion in adaptation planning. Racial coastal formation’s potential makes way for radical transformation in climate change science not only in coastal areas, but other spaces as situated territorial racial formations.
Keywords: Race, Vulnerability, Sea-level rise, Political ecology, Gullah Geechee, Georgia
Urban Political Ecology III: The Gendered and Queer Century
Here is my third and final report on urban political ecology (UPE) in Progress in Human Geography. A shout out to Noel Castree for excellent editorial guidance on the lot of these.
Abstract:
Given the ongoing importance of nature in the city, better grappling with the gendering and queering of urban political ecology offers important insights that collectively provides important political possibilities. The cross-currents of feminist political ecology, queer ecology, queer urbanism and more general contributions to feminist urban geography create critical opportunities to expand UPE’s horizons toward more egalitarian and praxis-centered prospects. These intellectual threads in conversation with the broader Marxist roots of UPE, and other second-generation variants, including what I have previously called abolition ecology, combine to at once show the ongoing promises of heterodox UPE and at the same time contribute more broadly beyond the realm of UPE.
Neil Smith’s Long Revolutionary Imperative
Happy to announce that we published the special collection of papers about the work of Neil Smith as both an free e-book and a special issue of Antipode:
Papers in the special collection were written by a fantastic group of scholars, including Andrew Ross, Timothy Brennan, Noel Castree, Susan W.S. Millar, Don Mitchell, John Morrissey, Tom Slater, John Paul Jones III, Helga Leitner, Sallie A. Marston, Eric Sheppard, Setha Low, Patrick Bond and Greg Ruiters.
We, the editors, wrote this introductory essay, based on some of Neil’s archival letters that Don Mitchell allowed us temporary access to. I’d urge folks to take a closer look at the cover art for the collection which is a portrait of Neil that Deb Cowen painted and allowed us to use.
Abstract: Whether writing about gentrification or nature, the production of space or the politics of scale, uneven development or public space, globalization or revolution, the geographer Neil Smith was nothing if not provocative. Neither Festschrift nor hagiography, this special issue of Antipode critically engages Smith’s work—not to unpick the rich tapestry, but to draw the threads out and spin them on in new directions. Consisting of newly commissioned essays by comrades from across the human sciences, it considers the entire range of Smith’s oeuvre. This paper introduces the essays by offering not only some thoughts about Smith’s intellectual contributions generally, but also new insight into the role he played in Antipode.
Toward an Abolition Ecology
This is one of my earliest essays on what is much larger project on abolition ecology. I was happy to have been asked to participate on the Editorial Review Board of the new Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics which quickly became a logical home for this essay which will be in the inaugural issue:
“Abolitionist politics continue to evolve in response to the ways racial capitalism exploits, oppresses and commits violence through uneven racial development. As environmental relations have always been part of this, in this short essay, Nik Heynen starts to grapple with what an ‘abolition ecology’ would look like.”
