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“Sit a Spell: Reflections on the Black Imagination and the Geographical Imagination”

"Can Geography, as a set of concepts and tools, be of relevance in solving the problems of the Black American community?" Dr. Bobby Wilson and Dr. Herman Jenkins posed this critical and timely question in 1972. More than five decades later, we "sit a spell" in conversation around Wilson and Herman's persistently urgent question. We do so by thinking through the development of Black Geographies as an academic field and an institution. Our dialogue covers four key themes. First, we reflect on the formation of the Black Geographies Specialty Group (BGSG) in 2017. Our reflection illuminates scholars whose research, teaching, activism, and mentorship knowingly and unknowingly laid the groundwork for BGSG. It likewise reflects on the importance of Black Studies to Geography. Second, we reflect on the efforts to establish BGSG within the American Association of Geographers over the past decade. We recognize that the process of institution building was logistical. And we elevate the ways Black Geographies engages both a politics of belonging for Black geographers and a means for affirming scholarship on Black geographies. Related, we move on to reflect on our scholarship and the ways in which Black geographies, as a field and institution, have allowed for capaciousness. Our scholarship has become increasingly more collaborative, emphasizing the importance of the rural, spirituality/religion, and the U.S. South. Finally, we imagine the necessarily multifarious, multiscalar futures of Black geographies

Priscilla McCutcheon (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky. She is also affiliated with the African American and Africana Studies program, where she is the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Much of her work has been with Black faith-based food programs and sustainable farms in the U.S. South. Priscilla is increasingly interested in Black spiritual and religious geographies and how the "spirit" is used to conceptualize space and place. Her work has been published in journals including ACME, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning D, and Southern Cultures. She is co-editor of the recently published Beyond the Black Kitchen Table: Black Women and Global Food Systems with Dr. Latrica Best and Dr. Theresa Rajack-Talley. In 2023, Priscilla was named an AAG Fellow. She is a native of Denmark, South Carolina, received her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia and her B.A. from Spelman College. 

LaToya E. Eaves (she/her) is a proud North Carolinian, a background that has profoundly influenced her scholarship. She has been instrumental in increasing the visibility of Black Geographies in addition to her research, which centers on questions of race, Blackness, gender, sexuality, and place — especially regarding the South. Her work appears in numerous journals, including Southern Cultures, Gender, Place, and Culture, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, and Dialogues in Human Geography, and she is co-editor with Kate Boyer and Jennifer Fluri on the recent Activist Feminist Geographies. Recipient of numerous awards, including the 2019 Ronald F. Abler Distinguished Service Honors for her transformative impact on the American Association of Geographers through her commitment to Black Geographies, she serves as P.I. on a half-million-dollar NSF grant for a collaborative project on museums and Black Geographies. She is an Associate Professor of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Eaves was named to the 2023 Class of AAG Fellows.

The City after Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit

In the early 2010s, the Motor City became a laboratory for reimagining postindustrial futures. A skeleton of its former self, city officials classified a staggering 150,000 lots—more than a third of Detroit’s land—as “vacant” or “abandoned,” designations that elided as much as they revealed. The notion of a city with too much land grabbed media headlines. As plans unfolded to shrink and green Detroit, a paradox emerged. Even as the city’s land problem was widely characterized as one of abundance (too much land and too little demand), it became more difficult for many residents to acquire land and stay in their homes. In this talk, Sara Safransky draws from A People’s Atlas of Detroit (2020) and her new book The City After Property to explore the complex questions of justice at the heart of this paradox. To understand how a city could have too much land but not enough to go around, Safransky rereads narratives of postindustrial decline. She argues that to more adequately confront the politics of abandonment that shape struggles over urban futures, we must go beyond seeing property as simply a thing that one owns (i.e., the land itself) and interrogate it as a historical and racialized construct, an ideology, and a moral force that shapes selves and worlds. In other words, we must ask what comes after property?  

Sara Safransky is a human geographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of The City after Property, co-editor of A People’s Atlas of Detroit, and co-producer of its sister documentary, A People’s Story of Detroit. Her writing can be found in Antipode, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environment & Planning D, Urban Geography, and elsewhere.

Dr. Lisa Bhungalia is a political geographer specializing in race, violence, and empire with a regional focus on the Southwest Asian and North African region. Her research explores the relationship between US empire, late modern warfare, and transnational linkages and encounters between the US and North Africa/Middle East region. 

"Guides for Queer Folks: Travel Guides, Maps, and Materiality"

Borrowing from scholarship in map studies, critical cartography, queer media studies. and critical bibliography, this talk examines the utility of queer geographic information as expressed through its materiality. Through an examination of queer spatial information from the 1930s to the mid-2000s—primarily travel guides and maps but also magazines, postcards, and advertising—this talk explores two main arguments. Firstly, that the physical arrangement of queer spatial media and the work individuals undertook to collect, circulate, protect, and keep up to date this information in the pre-digital era reveals this information's politics and perils. Secondly, the presentation argues that to understand these social currents there is a need for renewed attention to physical media and physical interaction during the archival research process. The talk concludes by examining the presenters’ efforts in developing an archival collection of queer spatial information.

“Seeds help me keep my proximity to all the things I don’t want to forget, through stories, flavors and recipes”

Turkish seed keeper Mehmet Öztan will discuss how seeds connect him to his memories of people, places and time; and how they helped him build relations with people of other cultural backgrounds while he is far away from his homeland and living in rural West Virginia. Öztan will also share his thoughts about racism in seed industry as an immigrant seed professional with a decade of experience in the field.