20 Dreams

Highlighting anti-colonial methodologies, this working paper addresses some of the limitations and possibilities of theorizing climate catastrophe and ecocide alongside race and racism. Working closely with Paul Gilroy, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, my thinking is propelled by their methodological clues that, as they unfold, unsettle analytical frames that tend to equate environmental toxicities with (degraded) blackness. The paper also centres pedagogy and draws attention to how black livingness is not a concept, per se, but a set of actions that teach us how to theorize our environs anew.

Speaker Information

Prof Katherine McKittrick is our 50th Geography in the Bluegrass Day Speaker. Prof McKittrick is Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen's University. She researches in the areas of Black studies, anti-colonial studies, and critical-creative methodologies. She authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, edited Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, and co-edited, with Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Her most recent monograph, Dear Science and Other Stories is an exploration of Black methodologies. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

We are grateful for support from the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies and our Geography Development Fund.

Learn more about this 50th Geography in the Bluegrass Day, here.

Landscape as Knowledge: Racial Capitalism, Citizen Science, and Environmental Modelling

Citizen science plays a crucial role in addressing gaps left by the state in environmental monitoring. This study examines various elements such as air quality monitors, rain gauges, and biodiversity to highlight how the deployment of low-cost sensors by residents can complement national services provided and national research projects. These citizen science initiatives offer enhanced local data that contributes to broader models for precipitation and air quality. However, processes racial capitalism give rise to a pattern of "socio-ecological segregation" in the geography of citizen science contributions: higher-income and predominantly white neighborhoods are more likely to participate in such projects. The presentation presents findings from hurdle models to underscore the uneven socio-ecological geographies that emerge, resulting in gaps in data representation and early warning systems for low-income and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities, thus perpetuating environmental injustices. This disparity creates a feedback cycle that further entrenches uneven socio-ecological spaces. The presentation concludes with a discussion on the future prospects of citizen science.

Assistant Professor Dillon Mahmoudi specializes in urban, digital, and economic geography, exploring the intersections of cities, technology, political ecology, and uneven development in his research. His broad work intersects critical human geography and critical GIS, focusing on understanding the political economic dimensions of urban environments, particularly in relation to issues of race, class, and environmental inequality. His current work engages in co-created research and community-based initiatives aimed at addressing socio-environmental injustices towards building just and sustainable futures. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, a Ph.D. in Urban Studies from Portland State, and is currently Assistant Professor in Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where he also serves as Graduate Program Director of the Just Maps GIS Masters, is a Faculty Fellow at the Hilltop Institute, and Affiliate Faculty in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics.

 

Join us for a public film screening and discussion of CALLS FROM HOME, a 2023 short film directed by Sylvia Ryerson, a Yale PhD student in American Studies. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Geography and the UK Appalachian Studies Program

A longstanding radio program sends familial messages of love to people incarcerated in Central Appalachia. Directed by Sylvia Ryerson, a former DJ for the show, CALLS FROM HOME follows the weekly broadcast through prison walls, portraying the many forms of distance that rural prison building creates—and the ceaseless work to end the racist system of mass incarceration and family separation.

Sylvia Ryerson (she/her) is a filmmaker, radio producer, organizer, and PhD student in American Studies at Yale University. Prior to graduate school, she worked at the documentary arts center Appalshop, in Whitesburg, Kentucky. There she served as a reporter and director of public affairs programming for Appalshop’s community radio station WMMT-FM and led the station's citizen journalism project. She also co-directed and hosted WMMT’s longstanding radio show Hip Hop from the Hilltop & Calls from Home broadcasting music and messages to people incarcerated in the region. She has co-produced numerous community-based participatory media projects working with movements for a just transition from fossil fuel extraction, the abolition of the prison industrial complex, and migrant justice. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Docs in Action Film Fund through Working Films to produce and direct her film CALLS FROM HOME, which won the Jack Spadaro Documentary Award for best nonfiction film or television presentation on Appalachia or its people from the Appalachian Studies Association. Her media & written work has appeared in the New York Times, American Quarterly, the Boston Review, NPR’s Here & Now and The Takeaway, the BBC, the Marshall Project, and other outlets. 

This screening also intends to build awareness around plans being pushed forward to build a new 1,408-person federal prison in Letcher County KY on a former mountain top removal site. On March 1 the Bureau of Prisons released their "Draft Environmental Impact Statement" which opens up a required 45-day public comment period. She is a founding member of the Racial Capitalism and the Carceral State (RCCS) Working Group at Yale, and of the Building Community Not Prisons (BCNP), a local and national coalition that is fighting to stop the construction of this prison and instead demanding investment in flood recovery, housing, education, and healthcare.

The film screening will be followed by a general Q & A along with a discussion with Sylvia and Dr. Lydia Pelot-Hobbs (UK Department of Geography) on mass incarceration in Central Appalachia.

A space of interrogation: opening the black box of asylum adjudication 

I examine the spatiality and practice of asylum adjudication in the context of the Danish asylum system. People who make an asylum claim in Denmark are required to participate in interviews conducted by the Danish Immigration Service. These interviews serve as the principal way through which the Danish state gathers evidence, assesses a person’s credibility, and determines an asylum claim. Bringing together insights from feminist political geography and feminist legal theory, I conceptualize the asylum interview as a quasi-legal space marked by wildly uneven but also uncertain power relations. I illustrate how the asylum interview and its ‘internal’ power dynamics are connected to and informed by other geographical sites, policing practices, and imaginations across multiple temporalities, spaces, and scales. While state authorities and politicians often represent the asylum interviews and the spaces in which they take place as impartial and sequestered from politics of any kind, I argue that the asylum interview is more akin to the quasi-legal dynamic of police interrogations. 

Dr Malene Jacobsen is a NUAcT Fellow in Geography at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. She is a feminist political geographer working at the intersection of political geography, critical refugee studies, and feminist legal theory. Malene has published on issues related to the geographies of war and refuge, families’ struggles to end forced separation, the politics of dispossession and refusal, as well as the legal re-writing of refugee protection. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Malene recently completed the EU-funded research project ‘JustAsylum’, which explored the lived realities and spaces of asylum adjudication.

Prison Capital by Dr. Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020.

Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy. Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.

Footloose: the work of location consultants in shaping US economic development

In this talk I will present ongoing research on the location consulting industry. From its origins in the 1919 Fantus Factory Locating Service in Chicago site selectors have come to play an extraordinarily influential role in brokering between companies seeking sites for investment and the communities seeking to attract that investment. In a series of papers with Nicholas Phelps we have documented the work of location consultants in effectively enabling the relocation of firms within the United States. I draw on archival work to describe the way in which Fantus accumulated a detailed geographical knowledge in order to make its recommendations about preferred sites for corporate investment.   From the 1950s onwards Fantus was also contracted by cities and States to provide advice on their economic development efforts. In doing so Fantus – and other location consultants that followed – were able to structure the landscape of economic development in the United States. I use the concept of the “business climate” -an index first developed by Fantus - to demonstrate how location consultants have effectively enabled and intensified the competition between communities for corporate investment and accordingly the increasingly footloose nature of US capitalism.   

I have a BA degree in Geography from Liverpool University, MA and PhD in Geography from Ohio State University and have held faculty positions at Sheffield University, the University of Oklahoma and - since 2006 - the University of Kentucky. My research is focused on two related areas. The first is the political dynamics of urban development. The second - and the focus in this presentation - is the endemic tension between the mobility and fixity of economic forms, activities and practices. The geographic 'stickiness' of economic activity is key to ongoing research with Nicholas Phelps (University of Melbourne) examining the growth and development of the location consulting industry. Findings from the research are set out in recent papers in Journal of Economic Geography, Business History, Environment and Planning A and Annals of the AAG.

The story of the lungs, or how atmospheric racism becomes embodied 

In this talk, I share stories of illness and death, as well as of survival and care, from Black workers and their families in a Southern aluminum company town. For Black workers, whose lungs toiled to maintain life under the burden of toxic wastes, shortness of breath and diagnoses such as COPD are symptomatic of an underlying pathology: a racist world that perverts the essential matter sustaining life into a tool of systematic violence. In these excerpts from my book, A Toxic Alchemy, I adopt Frantz Fanon’s description of colonialism as “atmospheric” violence to describe how racism becomes embodied through taking in contaminated air, and how the struggle for breath asks us to refuse the premise of disposability and demand a reimagining of the world. 

Pavithra Vasudevan (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Their research addresses toxicity as a manifestation of racial violence, capitalist entanglements with state and science, and the abolitional possibilities of collective struggle. Vasudevan is a recipient of the 2022-23 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for her first book project, A Toxic Alchemy: Race and Waste in Industrial Capitalism. Their research is grounded in collaboration and creative praxis, reimagining scholarship as storytelling in service to building a better world. 

 https://pavithravasudevan.com