Archive
“A plantation can be a commons”: Re‐Earthing Sapelo Island through Abolition Ecology
This was a long time in progress and came with all sorts of challenges but happy to have it out in the world.
Abstract
This paper is based on the 2018 Neil Smith Lecture presented at the University of St Andrews. It considers the plantation past/futures of Sapelo Island, Georgia, one of the Sea Islands forming an archipelago along the US Southeastern coast. I work through the abolitionist efforts of the Saltwater Geechee’s who have resided there since at least 1803 to better understand how we can mobilise an emancipatory politics of land and property and to produce commons that work to repair and heal the violence done through enslavement and ongoing displacement. I weave together a series of historical threads to better situate linked ideas of abolition democracy and abolition geography, and to extend the notion of abolition ecology as a strategic notion to connect Eurocentric based political ecologies with the emancipatory tradition of Black geographies.
Land Trusts as Conservation Boundary Organizations in Rapidly Exurbanizing Landscapes: A Case Study from Southern Appalachia
Abstract
Exurban development is occurring in many formerly rural areas nationwide, often outpacing the ability of institutions to update land use regulations. These pressures can negatively impact local ecosystems and natural resources, including reduced biodiversity and degraded water quality. Local nongovernmental organizations play an important role in promoting conservation in exurban landscapes, where there is relatively little regulatory and institutional infrastructure. Here, we draw on boundary organization theory to discuss how land trusts can function as boundary organizations, by using boundary objects and working as a bridge between community members, scientists, and governments to navigate complex conservation challenges. Mainspring Conservation Trust in southern Appalachia serves as a case study to explore methods for engaging and connecting diverse stakeholders. We show that land trusts can provide a flexible and necessary alternative to regulations for meeting conservation objectives by working at the boundary between science and local action.
What Harriet Tubman and John Brown can teach us about abolishing ‘White men’
Abstract
This commentary argues that one path toward Natalie Oswin’s ‘An Other Geography’ is through abolishing the institution of ‘White men’. Like other oppressive institutions, ‘White men’ have produced epistemic violence that has shaped and structured the discipline of geography in uneven and unjust ways. This essay is an effort to show appreciation and gratitude, and to stand in solidarity, with Oswin’s prophetic vision of ‘an other geography’. I mobilize the linked biographies of Harriet Tubman and John Brown as an entry point given how little we have yet worked to understand abolitionist history for thinking through the many ways we can work to transform geography.
Myths, Cults, Memories, and Revisions in Radical Geographic History
Summary
The power of myth to take on important political meaning while at the same time obscuring embodied historical geographies lurks everywhere. The mythic status of John Henry, when mobilized by Pete Seeger for instance, was used as a symbol for labor struggles across the U.S. Given the positive portrayal of his racialized might and power, so rarely valorized in mainstream U.S. culture, John Henry’s strength and perseverance were mobilized symbolically in the freedom marches of the civil rights movement. This chapter shows how myths about radical praxis can play tricks with history and geography, wherein some people and places acquire cultish status while others are eclipsed with profound impacts on our understanding of the discipline and its community engagements. It focuses on the basics of the popular, mythological, version of the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute and Fitzgerald as has been articulated within radical history. The DGEI.
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.
Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50
To celebrate Antipode’s 50th anniversary, we’ve brought together 50 short keyword essays by a range of scholars at varying career stages who all, in some way, have some kind of affinity with Antipode’s radical geographical project.
- The entries in this volume are diverse, eclectic, and to an extent random, however they all speak to our discipline’s past, present and future in exciting and suggestive ways
- Contributors have taken unusual or novel terms, concepts or sets of ideas important to their research, and their essays discuss them in relation to radical and critical geography’s histories, current condition and possible future directions
- This fractal, playful and provocative intervention in the field stands as a fitting testimony to the role that Antipode has played in the generation of radical geographical engagement with the world
Facilitating Interdisciplinary Graduate Education: Barriers, Solutions, and Needed Innovations
In Short:
•• Organizational hierarchies, policies, and budgetary models often disadvantage interdisciplinary programs and their students and faculty.
•• Examples exist across the country of improvements that can be made. However, in some areas— for example, accounting for and reporting interdisciplinary efforts— viable approaches are not yet clear and work remains to be done.
•• Improving interdisciplinary graduate education will require strong commitment from university leaders and a willingness to lay out clear, rational, and flexible policies and funding models.
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
