Book Celebration: The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Time: 4:00 - 6:00pm
Location: RCC Red Room

Join the Sociology Department together with the Science & Justice Research Center, the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) and The Black Geographies Lab, in the Rachel Carson College Red Room, to celebrate The Black Geographic (Duke University Press, 2023).

About The Black Geographic:

Co-edited by Associate Professor Camilla Hawthorne (Sociology, CRES), contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space. They examine key sites of inquiry: Black spatial imaginaries, resistance to racial violence, the geographies of racial capitalism, and struggles over urban space. Throughout, the contributors demonstrate that Blackness is itself a situating and place-making force, even as it is shaped by spatial processes and diasporic routes. Whether discussing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist print records or migration and surveillance in Niger, this volume demonstrates that Black Geographies is a mode of analyzing Blackness that fundamentally challenges the very foundations of the field of geography and its historical entwinement with colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism. In short, it marks a new step in the evolution of the field.

The Black Geographic  is available at Duke University Press.

Contributors. Anna Livia Brand, C.N.E. Corbin, Lindsey Dillon, Chiyuma Elliott, Ampson Hagan, Camilla Hawthorne, Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta, Jovan Scott Lewis, Judith Madera, Jordanna Matlon, Solange Muñoz, Diana Negrín, Danielle Purifoy, Sharita Towne

Rethinking Southern Urbanism from the Periphery

Friday, May 02, 2025

Time: 10:00 - 11:30am
Location: RCC 301 + Zoom Registration

Join the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) and WUI Research for Resilience (WRR) scholars, in RCC 301 and over Zoom, for a discussion with Xuefei Ren on, "Rethinking Southern Urbanism from the Periphery."

Global urban studies have undergone a peripheral turn, as scholars shift their focus from cities to peri-urban areas and hinterlands. This talk examines the evolving research on the Global South, using China as a case study to illuminate this shift. It argues that studies of the Global South must look beyond megacities and engage with a broader range of peripheral regions and urban experiences. Finally, the discussion raises comparative questions to reconsider Southern urbanism from the peripheral regions.

Graduate students and faculty: the book talk will be followed by a meeting of the Sociology department's Critical Urban Studies from 12-2pm on Friday afternoon (hybrid). If you are interested in taking part please contact hangelo@ucsc.edu for details.

Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist who studies urban governance and the built environment in comparative perspective. She is the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). She is a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a fellow in the Humanity’s Urban Future program of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). She has served as a co-editor for Journal of Urban Affairs, City and Community, and on the editorial board of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Her research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Urban Studies Foundation, among others. Her new projects include The City after Covid-19, which examines vulnerability and urban governance in Chicago, Toronto and Johannesburg.