The city of Cartagena, located in the Colombian Caribbean, has become an emblematic case of climate change risk and vulnerability. Industrial, urban and tourism development has resulted in the dramatic loss and deterioration of mangrove ecosystems that, despite their strategic importance for climate change mitigation and adaptation projects, have historically been sites of industrial waste dumping and organized abandonment. In this presentation, I analyze the efforts led by four different Black grassroots organizations that have dedicated their efforts to reclaim, defend and recover Cartagena's mangroves. Drawing from ethnographic research, I seek to better understand mangrove spaces as Black ecologies that materialize a politics of life at the frontlines of climate change. 

 

Diana Ojeda is a Colombian geographer working at the intersections of feminist political ecology and critical agrarian studies. She is currently Professor in the Department of Geography and the Department of International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington where she directs the Commons Program at the Ostrom Workshop. She is also member of the Latin American feminist collective Miradas Críticas al Territorio.

How do environmental and climate justice advocates mobilize to pursue their goals in moments when much of the political establishment is openly hostile to those ends? In this presentation I explore several cases where grassroots activists and organizations worked to create collective practices and infrastructures aimed at achieving measures of environmental and climate justice for marginalized communities, despite opposition and/or neglect from elected officials and government agencies. Finally, I consider what lessons these struggles offer for a range of social movements during the current moment of intensified state repression in the U.S.”

Dr. David Pellow is the Dehlsen Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Pellow’s talk is entitled "Environmental and Climate Justice Politics and Practice in Troubled Times” (abstract below, flyer attached).

Dr. Alvarez León will be presenting via Zoom.

Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In this talk, based on his recent book, The Map in the Machine, Luis F. Alvarez León examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of IP geolocation, ridesharing, and a new Earth Observation satellite ecosystem. He develops a geographical theory of digital capitalism centered on the processes of location, valuation, and marketization to provide a new vantage point from which to better understand, and intervene in, the dominant techno-economic paradigm of our time. By centering the spatiality of digital capitalism, Alvarez León shows how this system is the product not of seemingly intangible information clouds but rather of a vast array of technologies, practices, and infrastructures deeply rooted in place, mediated by geography, and open to contestation and change.

Luis Felipe Alvarez León is Associate Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. In 2016, he completed his PhD in Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was presented with the Best Dissertation Award by the AAG Economic Geography Specialty Group (EGSG). From 2016 to 2018, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Sol Price Center for Social Innovation and in 2018 he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Urban and Economic Geography at Clark University. His work focuses on the political economy of geospatial data, media, and technologies. He is currently working on the geographies of autonomous vehicles, and the changing political economy of remote sensing. He is the author of The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism(University of California Press, 2024).

Bergeron's talk will explore the "Land Back" movement by considering the Onondaga Nation's ongoing efforts for sovereignty and self-determination in central New York. Focusing on the Nation's 2005 land rights action and ongoing efforts to reclaim and care for Onondaga Lake—a sacred and heavily polluted site—this presentation examines the historical dispossession of Onondaga territory, the limitations of U.S. legal frameworks, and the Nation's recent grant of 1000 acres from the State. The talk situates the Onondaga case within the broader context of land justice and argues that "Land Back" is a path towards sovereignty and environmental justice.
 

Emily Bergeron, JD, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historic Preservation at the University of Kentucky. She is affiliate faculty with both the Center for Equality and Social Justice and the program in Environmental & Sustainability Studies. Her legal scholarship and professional service center on advancing equity, access, and justice at the intersections of historic preservation, environmental and cultural resource law, sustainability, Indigenous rights, and environmental justice. Dr. Bergeron’s work has appeared in publications such as Human Rights, Natural Resources & Environment, and The Environmental Forum. She is also a contributing author and editor for several books, including the forthcoming Environmental Law Horror Stories. She serves on the editorial boards of Human Rights and Preservation Education & Research, holds leadership roles within the American Bar Association on committees dedicated to civil rights and social justice, and serves on the board of the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation.

In this presentation, I consider how a movement analytic, or a focus on Indigenous mobilities, helps in conceiving of Indigenous political ecologies. I focus on extractivism, including mining, that have shaped colonial relations in Treaty 9 territory in northern Ontario Canada, the homelands and waters of the Mushkegowuk (Cree), Anishinaabe and Oji-Cree peoples. Drawing on qualitative interviews, oral histories and archival records, one my aims is to contribute to Indigenous conceptions of political ecology by considering how place, in this case the place of the muskegs (or Treaty 9), is storied and stretched through Indigenous movement, including Indigenous water mobilities. I focus on movement as forced relocation and displacement to examine how Canadian settlement, and its reliance on extractivism, has undermined Indigenous kinship and relational obligations in the muskegs. Building on this, I’m also interested in how movement is shaped by Indigenous knowledge, praxis and political resurgence, and how relational obligations are sustained and remade through autonomous mobility practices. I end by considering how a movement analytic expands on understandings of Indigeneity and possibilities for Indigenous futures.  



Michelle Daigle is Mushkegowuk (Cree), a member of Constance Lake First Nation in Treaty 9, and of French ancestry. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto with a cross-appointment in the Department of Geography and Planning and the Centre for Indigenous Studies and holds a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Geographies. Drawing on collaborations with Indigenous communities and organizations, her research examines Indigenous life-making practices amid the global conditions of colonial capitalist violence. Her current project focuses on the renewal of Indigenous kinship that emerge through Mushkegowuk waterways and how an ethics of care informs conceptions of anti-colonial futures. Her writing has been published in Progress in Human Geography, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Environment & Planning D, Political Geography and The Journal of Peasant Studies, and she recently co-edited Land Back: Relational Landscapes of Indigenous Resistance Across the Americas with Heather Dorries which was published with Harvard University Press in 2024.

During the last century, advances in aviation and camera technology made topographic mapping with shaded reliefs and elevation contours a cornerstone of modern cartography. More recently, active remote sensing technology like LiDAR has decoupled the cartographer's need for sunlight and revolutionized our ability to observe and map places. This presentation explores the opportunities of LiDAR mapping and argues for a more nuanced understanding of topography, one that reflects the word's ancient Greek roots: 'topos' (place) and 'graphia' (writing) – literally, place writing.

Boyd Shearer has more than five years of creative teaching and course development and over twenty-five years of map publishing, web design, and GIS consulting. He has a worked as a cartographer for the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center, where he mapped the social, environmental, and economic conditions of Appalachia. He has published original research on historic parks in Kentucky and has GPS mapped hundreds of miles of recreational trail. He is dedicated to making maps for our national parks and forests. Boyd is presently a Lecturer of mapping and GIS at the University of Kentucky with a research focus in developing hiking trail metrics, lidar and 3D maps, and creating near real-time park weather maps. 



 

Communities have been faced with mobility and environmental challenges over decades. For example, the reliance on automobiles have led to decreased physical activities, increased air pollution, and transportation congestion in cities. Efforts to develop healthy, sustainable transportation and environmental systems often include provisions for increasing rates of active transportation and offering environmental exposure assessment to inform health-promoting policies. With rapid development in sensor technologies and geospatial techniques, opportunities arise to upgrade the solutions. This talk will introduce ongoing efforts in leveraging air and mobility solutions to address environmental and transportation barriers. Case studies in monitoring and modeling of air quality and mobility will be introduced. Particularly, experiences in field work, sensor technologies, and model development will be discussed.

Tianjun Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health at University of Kentucky. With background in exposure assessment and urban planning, his research focuses on leveraging sensor technologies and geospatial techniques to develop health-promoting community-based air and traffic monitoring campaigns and empirical models.

Between 2014 and 2020, the Large Lots program sold hundreds of city-owned lots for a dollar to property owners across Chicago's South and West Sides. While Large Lots helped return land to tax rolls and offset its holding costs, the city cast it as an effort to empower residents and turn vacant lots into vibrant neighborhoods. This talk examines the labor of making vibrant neighborhoods. Against its erasure by the city planning imaginary, I situate this labor as an important dimension of life's work under regimes of organized abandonment and their attendant economies of real estate speculation. Through interviews with lot owners, I demonstrate that Large Lots reconfigures relations of responsibility around vacant land in ways that enroll residents' social reproductive labor of land care into the production of investable landscapes. Through a property records analysis, I show that Large Lots establishes renewed channels for speculation in program neighborhoods. These findings situate social reproduction as a generative vantage point for critical understandings of real estate speculation and the uneven geographies of life-making it engenders. I conclude with a critical reflection on deeds registries as archives within which to trace speculative real estate investments and the layered histories of dispossession that constitute their conditions of possibility.


Dr. Rea Zaimi is a critical urban geographer whose research and teaching center on the political economy of housing and real estate in US cities. Dr. Zaimi's archival and ethnographic research examines how historic property regimes structure contemporary processes of speculative and predatory real estate investment, and their implications for housing precarity and life's work in Chicago and Atlanta. Her work is committed to advancing our understanding of the mechanisms that embed social difference within the economic and institutional infrastructures shaping access to shelter. Rea earned her MA and PhD in Geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University with a faculty affiliation in the Department of Geosciences.