The Brick Wall You Cannot See - On the Limits of Knowing for Anti-Racist Futures
The often unstated presumption of scholarship that seeks to advance decolonial, environmentally just and anti-racist projects is that new knowledge ought to be generated in order to contribute to those projects.  In this talk, I question that presumption.  I engage Kristie Dotson’s work on “epistemic back grounding,” and Katherine McKittrick’s piece “Mathematics Black Life” to argue that how we go about knowing is as important for anti-racist futures as what we ultimately know. Informed by 10 years of collaborations with community-based organizations and social movements, I argue for a processual conception of anti-racist and decolonial knowledges that are attentive to the social relations engendered by acts of knowing and conclude that we ought not seek to know revolutionary and anti-racist things, but rather know in anti-racist and revolutionary ways.

Kate Derickson runs the Minnesota Praxis Lab and is the co-director of the CREATE project, funded by the University of Minnesota's Grand Challenges initiative to develop environmental research with communities. Her work has appeared in a range of journals, including Society & Space, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, and Urban Studies. She is an editor of the journal Society and Space, an Associate at the U of MN's Institute on the Environment and a 2015 - 2017 McKnight Land-Grant Professor.