In May of 2015, with her mind still on freedom and transforming the soil that her enslaved ancestors were forced to work, Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey, a well-known Saltwater Geechee activist, writer and storyteller brought together her son Maurice, and a Professor from the University of Georgia named Nik, to help her grow numerous varieties of Gullah Geechee heritage crops; she did so in an effort to mobilize a vision for preserving her community. By summer of 2017, she, Maurice and Nik started to see her vision begin to manifest through the clearing of land, erecting of fences, installing of irrigation, planting of crops and pulling of weeds; lots of weeds. But then in September 2017, Hurricane Irma engulfed the Hogg Hummock community in a violent storm surge; one of the largest/most intact remaining Gullah Geechee communities left in the country was under six feet of water including the initial crop of Purple Ribbon sugarcane they had grown together. As the storm waters receded and the crops dried out, a month later, Mrs. Cornelia suddenly passed away. Nik, who had promised Mrs. Cornelia that he would do all he could to help Maurice make her vision a reality the last time they spoke, two weeks before her passing amidst the havoc wreaked by Irma, realized that promise took on life-changing meaning in her death; it felt like a mandate that could never be renegotiated. This epistolary talk will chronicle the travails, tribulations and little triumphs the Hogg Hummock community has experienced since Mrs. Cornelia’s passing. The talk will also chronicle Maurice and Nik’s work together to make her vision a reality since her death, through letters written to her.

Nik Heynen is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia and a Visiting Scholar in Food Studies at Spelman College. His research interests sit at the intersection of economic, environmental and racial justice. For just over a decade he has been working with members of the Saltwater Geechee in the Hogg Hummock community on Sapelo Island on the restoration of traditional agricultural practices and flood mitigation made necessary as a result of descendants losing their land to development pressure and increasing sea-level rise. Through this work he co-directs UGA’s Cornelia Walker Bailey Program on Land, Sea and Agriculture with Maurice Bailey. He is also the Director of Education and a board member for the Athens-based oyster shell recycling non-profit organization Shell to Shore.

The University of Kentucky Department of Geography invites you to our 51st Annual Geography in the Bluegrass Day, a celebration of the Geography program, our history, our students and faculty, our alumni and friends, and the achievements of all.

More information about the event

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).