Rob Them: Competing Ontological Traditions in Geographical Contestations ♥

About the talk:
Contention for geographic spaces is rooted in how communities create meaningful engagement with the environment. The origins and mechanisms communities use to formulate communal practices builds ontological traditions that compete through systems of domination over methods to order geographic spaces. Contentions illuminate both how power is organized through regimes and the narratives about communities that shape racialization. Geography is racialized and race is better understood through geography. Under racial capitalism, how is Blackness used to (re)order spaces? What are the conditions for forming, (re)organizing and destroying Black geographies? What is the resistance that Black knowledges of geography brings to compete with systems of domination? This chapter argues racial capitalism necessitates the dispossession of Black geographies to maintain racial regimes. Thus, the mechanisms to dispute this dispossession must address communal modes of redemption.

About the speaker:
Stephanie Jones is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at UC Irvine. She studies the relationship between race and geography within the context of racial capitalism. Her current research looks at geographic struggles within Oakland, CA through the lens of residents witnessing the reordering of their community. She theorizes how racial capitalism produces vulnerable populations through housing. The empirical contribution of her research is to provide a framework for Black geographies as people are being dispossessed. The theoretical contribution is to provide a conceptualization for Black geographies existing through abjections and placelessness as understood through residents of Oakland.