In the News

The 2022 AAG conference is HERE.

Download the BGSG sessions HERE.

BGSG AAG session spotlight on:

Meet the 2022 JLAG speakers:

2021 AAG Schedule and Events

The Black Geographies Specialty Group is excited to sponsor the following panels, roundtables, and plenaries. Please view the calendar here and download the iCal here. Please sign up for our annual business meeting, open to the public, here

Abolition in Digital Geographies

Sponsor Groups: Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group, Latinx Geographies Specialty Group, Black Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/7/2021

Start / End Time: 8:00 AM / 9:15 AM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Exploring Blackness in the Urban Environment: Housing, Evictions, and Neighborhood Dynamics

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/7/2021

Start / End Time: 11:10 AM / 12:25 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

 

Global Black Geographies [1]: Racialized Spaces, Black Space-Making and Theorizing: Making/Defining Communities and Spaces

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Latinx Geographies Specialty Group, Caribbean Specialty Group

Day: 4/7/2021

Start / End Time: 1:30 PM / 2:45 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Global Black Geographies [2]: Racialized Spaces, Black Space-Making and Theorizing: Movements and Displacements

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Africa Specialty Group, Latinx Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/7/2021

Start / End Time: 3:05 PM / 4:20 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Global Black Geographies [3]: Racialized Spaces, Black Space-Making and Theorizing: Spatial Claims

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Latinx Geographies Specialty Group, Caribbean Specialty Group

Day: 4/7/2021

Start / End Time: 4:40 PM / 5:55 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

The Gender, Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Lecture: “Black Mediterranean Geographies”

Sponsor Groups: Feminist Geographies Specialty Group, Black Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/8/2021

Start / End Time: 8:00 AM / 9:15 AM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 54

Black Geography Specialty Group Business Meeting

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/8/2021

Start / End Time: 12:30 PM / 1:25 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Examining systems of power in agriculture and food geographies

Sponsor Groups: Geographies of Food and Agriculture Specialty Group, Black Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/8/2021

Start / End Time: 1:30 PM / 2:45 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Refusing Neoliberal Diversity Work in the Imperial University

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group, Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group

Day: 4/8/2021

Start / End Time: 3:05 PM / 4:20 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Building Inclusive Communities and Diverse Departments, Supporting Women in Geography 8th Annual Panel

Sponsor Groups: Feminist Geographies Specialty Group, Queer and Trans Geographies Specialty Group, Black Geographies Specialty Group, Careers and Professional Development

Day: 4/8/2021

Start / End Time: 4:40 PM / 5:55 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Feminist research methods and intersectionality I

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Feminist Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/9/2021

Start / End Time: 8:00 AM / 9:15 AM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 42

Feminist research methods and intersectionality II

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Feminist Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/9/2021

Start / End Time: 9:35 AM / 10:50 AM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 42

‘Where life is precious, life is precious’: Celebrating Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/9/2021

Start / End Time: 11:10 AM / 12:25 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 12

Confronting structures of power in biophysical research I: resisting and challenging the narrative

Sponsor Groups: Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, Black Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/9/2021

Start / End Time: 1:30 PM / 2:45 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Confronting structures of power in biophysical research II: intervening in the outcomes of research

Sponsor Groups: Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, Black Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/9/2021

Start / End Time: 3:05 PM / 4:20 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Confronting structures of power in biophysical research III: generating new conversations

Sponsor Groups: Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, Black Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/9/2021

Start / End Time: 4:40 PM / 5:55 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Desirable Futures I: Time As Possibility, Practice, Politics (Opening Panel)

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group

Day: 4/10/2021

Start / End Time: 8:00 AM / 9:15 AM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 30

Author Meets Critics: “Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica” by Jovan Scott Lewis

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Caribbean Specialty Group

Day: 4/10/2021

Start / End Time: 8:00 AM / 9:15 AM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Desirable Futures II: Time As Possibility, Practice, Politics

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group

Day: 4/10/2021

Start / End Time: 9:35 AM / 10:50 AM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 30

Author Meets Critics: Tiffany King’s The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group

Day: 4/10/2021

Start / End Time: 9:35 AM / 10:50 AM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Desirable Futures III: Time As Possibility, Practice, Politics

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group

Day: 4/10/2021

Start / End Time: 11:10 AM / 12:25 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 30

Desirable Futures IV: Time As Possibility, Practice, Politics

Time: 75 Minute(s)

Type: Virtual Paper

Day: 4/10/2021

Start / End Time: 1:30 PM / 2:45 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 30

BGSG and QTGSG Keynote with Dr. Marlon Bailey

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Queer and Trans Geographies Specialty Group, Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group

Day: 4/10/2021

Start / End Time: 1:30 PM / 2:45 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Desirable Futures V: Time As Possibility, Practice, Politics

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group

Day: 4/10/2021

Start / End Time: 3:05 PM / 4:20 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 30

Desirable Futures VI: Time As Possibility, Practice, Politics (Closing Panel)

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group, Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group

Day: 4/10/2021

Start / End Time: 4:40 PM / 5:55 PM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 30

Protests, Racial Inequality, and Social Change

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/11/2021

Start / End Time: 8:00 AM / 9:15 AM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Expert Perspectives on Social Movements Local and Global

Sponsor Groups: Black Geographies Specialty Group

Day: 4/11/2021

Start / End Time: 9:35 AM / 10:50 AM (PDT)

Room: Virtual 10

Awards

The Black Geographies Specialty Group Executive Board would like to congratulate former BGSG Vice-Chair Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis for being one of three recipients of the 2021 American Association of Geographers’ Diversity and Inclusion Awards! 

From the press release:

“Dr. Jovan Lewis is assistant professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he co-leads the Economic Disparities research cluster in Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. Lewis’s efforts in research, teaching, mentorship, and service are bringing Black geographies (and Black geographers) to the forefront of the discipline, changing UC Berkeley Geography’s intellectual culture in emphasizing Black studies and Black geographies. He has worked across departments and programs on his campus and beyond, to engage public groups. Lewis integrates this work into his teaching and mentoring, through symposiums on campus and active recruitment of Black students to his program. Co-editor, with Dr. Camilla Hawthorne, of an influential volume, The Black Geographic, Lewis is also the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica. His forthcoming second book, Violent Utopia, examines the experience and articulation of Black sovereignty and freedom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from the settlement of the Indian Territory through the centenary of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

Within the AAG, Lewis is a key leader leveraging and amplifying Black Geographies, helping to lead the Black Geographies Specialty Group, and successfully advocating for the inclusion of Black Geographies as a theme of the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting. Notably, Dr. Lewis is still only in the first decade of his career as a professor. His dedication to his students and to the larger community indicate a promising future of further leadership.

‘I am honored to be a recipient of the 2021 AAG Diversity and Inclusion award and I thank my friends and colleagues for nominating me and the award committee for selecting me. The AAG has long counted among its members individuals and groups devoted to equity and justice as both political and intellectual concerns. I have sought to continue in that tradition and to advance it alongside my brilliant colleagues in the Black Geographies Specialty Group and through Berkeley Black Geographies.’”

2020 Clyde Woods Black Geographies Specialty Group Graduate Student Paper Award Winner

April 22, 2020

On behalf of the 2020 Clyde Woods Black Geographies Specialty Group Graduate Student Paper Award Committee, the Board is pleased to announce that this year’s winner is Kaily Heitz, with a paper titled “Unfolding the Frame: The Geographic Matter of Black Life, Image and Form.” Kaily is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. In this promising work, the author argues that the imaginaries of Oakland as a Black space in the midst of advancing gentrification and displacement must be explored simultaneously as the commoditized form that facilitates development, and as a formulation of Black struggle and refusal. This essay looks specifically at the photographic image as a Black space through which Oakland is (re)produced in order to understand how circulated media images navigate contradicting claims to space, and the ambiguity between the identity and lived experience of a place.

Congratulations to Kaily Heitz from the Black Geographies Specialty Group Executive Board!

The goal of the BGSG Graduate Student Paper Award is to honor the legacy of late scholar Dr. Clyde Woods by supporting graduate students whose work focuses on Black geographies. Woods invested his time in the intellectual life of Black studies and with Black scholars, particularly students. Woods was known for providing intellectual validity to students who were unable to divorce embodied and alternative knowledge systems from their scholarship. Instead, Woods mentored students towards scholarly interventions that deciphered new practices and social visions. In the wake of Woods’ passing, his legacy has permeated a new generation of Black Geographies scholars. As with the students Woods mentored directly, this generation is working towards the transformation of scientific inquiry, resisting the exclusion of indigenous intellectual traditions of Black landscapes and geographic thought found in their projects. The award winner will work with Antipode’s Editorial Collective to prepare their paper for peer review and, if successful, publication as an open-access article in the journal Antipode  (see our 2018 paper award winner’s article, “For ‘Peace, Quiet, and Respect’: Race, Policing and Land Grabbing on Chicago’s South Side.” by Teona Williams). Throughout this process, the author will receive mentorship from a senior scholar on the Antipode team. Antipode will also host a forum about the paper on the AntipodeFoundation.org platform, inviting two scholars to write responses

Access the most recent BGSG newsletter here:

• Newsletter, Winter 2021
• Newsletter, Spring 2019
• Newsletter, Spring 2018