Harriet Ann Jacobs, born enslaved in North Carolina, was more than a fugitive freedom seeker. She was also known, loved, and held by Black South ecosystems of witness. Michelle Lanier archivally and ecologically roots the epistolary poem, ‘terraqueous,’ in an effort to shrink the distance between the commemorative echoes of Jacobs’s story and the soils and waters that held her first breaths and acts of resistance.
Las dinámicas de urbanización en el periodo neoliberal pueden ser pensadas como nuevas formas de cercamiento de los bienes comunes o como una forma de acumulación por desposesión, según Harvey (2005). Esto despierta nuevas estrategias de acción colectiva que se expresan como espacios de resistencia contra el despojo capitalista. En el presente artículo nos interesa hacer un cuestionamiento al urbanismo neoliberal y sus procesos de gentrificación, a través de la defensa de los bienes comunes urbanos vistos como un proceso que se ocupa fundamentalmente de desmercantilizar el espacio público, cuyo rasgo principal no solo es ya potencialmente antagónico a los intereses del capital, sino transformador por su defensa de las estrategias de reproducción social mediante la autoorganización y la puesta en común de estructuras de reciprocidad que refuerzan los lazos convivenciales y comunitarios. Este estudio se centra en las dinámicas de urbanización neoliberal de la ciudad de Querétaro en donde los procesos de gentrificación constituyen una forma de despojo urbano que amenaza con desplazar a la población de los barrios tradicionales del centro histórico, además de transformar sus modos de vida. En respuesta, el emblemático barrio de San Francisquito genera un proceso de resistencia que se caracteriza por la creación de formas organizativas que tienen en el centro la defensa de lo común, y la reapropiación del territorio, a partir de la reinvindicación de sus características identitarias y socioculturales.
In this article, we interrogate the representation and construction of public park space in a settler colonial city: Toronto/Tkaronto. First, we draw on the relationship between urban neoliberalism and prudentialism to demonstrate the way public health authorities in Toronto/Tkaronto promoted a neoliberal ideology of prudentialism that emphasized individual action (e.g., social distancing, personal hygiene, sheltering in place) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, we consider the extent to which this response congealed and combined with broader anxieties that were used to manage more than the virus. We focus specifically on the way these anxieties took hold in public park space, and in particular the response to encampment communities. We theorize prudentialism, as an instrument of the white settler state, to interrogate the twin processes of organized abandonment and organized violence (Gilmore 2022), which were made visible in the treatment of unhoused people amidst the pandemic in an affluent and seemingly progressive city in a nation now known as Canada. Recognizing that COVID-19 has afflicted global cities marred by real estate speculation and the continual reliance on the commodification of Indigenous Land, which has made homelessness and urban displacement a lived condition for some, we argue that public health crises result not from—and thereby cannot be solved by—prudential responsibilization, but from the willful ignorance of the neoliberal, capitalist white settler [real estate] state (Stein 2019).
With increased interest in Latinx geographies there is a need for more in-depth exploration of how Latinx geographers are approaching this work in their own words. In this article, we open a discussion on Latinx geographies that is grounded in our multiple, different, embodied experiences as Latinx geographers who have gathered over the last several years to have conversations, create spaces and build relationships of care and accountability with each other. We reflect on how we each arrived to Latinx geographies, what it means to us, how we do Latinx geographies and what is on the horizon. We refuse singular or imposed definitions, and collectively imagine an expansive, nuanced, and relational Latinx geographies that critically engages with difference, conquest, power, and liberation across Turtle Island and Abya Yala.
Millions of students in the United States are saddled with trillions of dollars in debt. The debt crisis is a behemoth, though, importantly, it is not monolithic. Experiences of student debt are unequal and uneven, and it is critical to study them as such to address them. There are many organizations bringing attention to the student debt crisis; however, there are surprisingly few institutions dedicated to studying it. Further, there are few studies that link the student debt crisis to other competing, nested crises of the present (e.g., climate change). Using theories of debt and indebtedness to contextualize the student debt crisis, this paper utilizes auto-ethnographic accounts of student debt – as a student debtor and faculty member – and ‘gray literature’ (reports, policies, and statistics) to highlight and analyze the uneven geographies of student debt in the US. The aim of this paper is to argue that a geographic perspective is generative for studying student debt because it allows for a more nuanced understanding of where and why student debt exists and persists with the intention of complementing ongoing activism to abolish student debt. This paper concludes with four potential pathways for future geographic research on student debt and a call for action.
In this paper, we propose embodied listening as pedagogical praxis in which we are receptive to how our whole bodies are involved in communicating with each other. Embodied listening disrupts what we call “speech-as-presence”—normative expectations of student participation emphasizing verbal contributions and privileging particular bodies. These expectations contribute to the reproduction of oppressive logics at work in classrooms—racism, hetero-patriarchy, white feminism, masculinism, ableism, colonialism. We argue that embodied listening can serve as a source of knowledge about these logics, supporting transformation of classroom expectations beyond imposed norms. We reflect on our experiences developing embodied listening practices in our undergraduate courses through our observations and students’ own reflections. Our findings demonstrate both the transformative potential of listening in classrooms and the tensions produced as these strategies discomfited students and disrupted classroom norms. Finally, we engage with critical perspectives on listening positionality from Indigenous studies, disability studies, and sound studies towards deepening our understanding of differences and multiplicities in how we listen. We illustrate how we continue to develop ways to incorporate this work in our classrooms and support students in the exhaustive and uncomfortable work of embodied listening and imaginative ways of being in the classroom.
Critical translation between languages requires consideration not only of the meanings of words, but also of the translator's embeddedness in worlds which assign those meanings. Especially when working with geographic texts, reflecting on the places and spatial experiences that shape our understanding and use of words can be pertinent to creating authentic translations. In translating Yann Calbérac and Marianne Morange and Cécile Gintrac's texts that present an overview of French critical geographies, the translator reflects on ways her own history in French, American, and Canadian academic spaces effects her ability to transfer the nuances of French critical geographies to an Anglophone audience.
In this poem-letter the speaker addresses their hometown, a place of familiarity and contradiction. Through exploring the dark past of Southern North Carolina an intimate account of living in community is illustrated.
Orlando Ochoa and León Ozuna write to each other and reflect on the details of their friendship, love, loneliness, and sex across distance. This epistolary/poetic exchange is an answer to the question of how Ochoa and Ozuna—Mexican poets and lovers from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas—keep alive in the world.
In the wake of her uncle’s 2021 death from COVID-19 in a Michigan prison, Danielle Purifoy reflects on what his life and art taught her about abolition, and what kind of place could have given him a different life…and death.
I address this letter to myself on November 25, 2014, the day after the non-indictment of Michael Brown’s murderer, when a resounding silence in my college physics class sparked a fire in me and a journey of awakening and action. Somewhere between a love letter and a condolence, a reassurance and a forewarning, these words serve to soften my stumble towards empowerment and insight as I grow as a young organizer in the Black Lives Matter movement.
This letter is an expression of gratitude, from two students of social movements in India who are currently working in the USA, to the thousands of unknown Indian kisans (peasants). In 2020-21, peasants from across the country protested and participated in a movement widely known as anti-farm law movement—which was, in turn, triggered by the passage of three laws, together known as the farm laws, that aimed to liberalize agricultural commodity production and marketing. But what started out as a movement with a limited purpose soon morphed into a statement against the high-handedness of the Indian state. Through this letter, we pay a tribute to the farmers who drew inspiration from diverse intellectual strands including Gandhiism and Ambedkarite philosophy to craft a profound statement to highlight the precarity experienced by the farmers and in defense of India’s democratic ethos.
This open letter to the promotoras de salud (community health workers) of Long Beach, California explores the multifaceted demands placed on low-wage, highly skilled health educators within the nonprofit industrial complex, and exposes the geographies of Latinx health precarity from the perspective of urban health care feminized labor. The letter also shares and celebrates the deep commitment to justice that promotoras struggle toward through their care work.
This letter takes place as a conversation with my newborn about the struggles and desires I see on the horizon at the moment of writing. The letter’s simple style and straightforward language invite you to immerse yourself in an intimate sharing between myself and my one-year-old and consider the perspective of a young child coming to grips with the world around them. I draw on past conversations with my mother about her illness and her ecological work, as well as elements of our family history working and living on the river Clyde. Falling somewhere between a poem, a story and a letter, I explore themes of change and hope, ecological precarity, health and illness, and a path towards more livable worlds. Two photos included with the letter share intimate moments with the reader related to my writing – the moment Clyde reaches for his grandmother at the water’s edge, an ode to the river on which she grew up and after which he is named; and the moment my mother unfolds her hand letting an edible flower sit delicately along her hand’s life lines as an offering of nourishment and interconnection.
The letter charts my relationship to geography through a letter to Donald Deskin Jr. From Black geographer junior scholar to pioneering Black geographer, this letter uses Black geographies as an analytic to think through Black geographical knowledge, practice and kinship.
In this special issue, we propose the letter as a form with geographic potential. Building on prior work on letters in geography, Black feminism, and Indigenous studies, we draw on a collection of sixteen letters in the section to build a case for letters as time travel, anticolonial epistemology, feminist geographic method, and worldmaking praxis. We bring together letter writers who speak to their ancestors known and unknown, to future generations, to ideas, to activists, to places, and to strangers—and weave them into a messy and generative conversation on the kinds of spaces that letters make between and among us. Our intention is to build on recent work in geography to experiment with what the letter makes possible for us as geographers.
In this letter, Elspeth Iralu initiates a time-travelling correspondence with her paternal grandfather, Vichazelhu Iralu, about his dreams for the Naga sovereignty movement. The letter grieves the loss of personal and political archives that were stolen, disappeared, and destroyed through processes of colonization. Iralu offers letter-writing, shaped by Naga modes of storytelling, as an anticolonial epistemology that enacts Naga sovereignty in the here and now.
