Call for Panelists
Graduate Student Panel- Anti-racism politics in the city: a graduate student roundtable
Session Sponsored by the Urban Geography Specialty Group
Session Type: Panel session, roundtable discussion
Organizers: Rachael Baker, York University; Emma Slager, University of Washington
Panel theme: Emerging graduate student research and praxis on urban anti-racist politics
Call for Panelists:
The call to thematically focus on Black Geographies during the 2018 annual American Association of Geographers meeting is, as theme organizers LaToya Eaves are Aretina Hamilton say, timely, and upholds Katherine McKittrick’s declaration that “black matters are spatial matters.” At the same time, the thematic focus on Public Engagement in Geography emphasizes the importance of scholar activism, public pedagogy, and participatory action research. Bringing these two themes together, we acknowledge that the field of geography is bound to the work of colonialism and spatial dispossession of people of color and argue that to commit to the work and worldings of advancing Black Geographies, there is an additional opportunity to hold ourselves accountable as emerging scholars, to structure our research and methodologies in ways that advance publicly-oriented anti-racist values and practice. Beyond the actual study of anti-racist mobilizations, we seek contributions on this panel from graduate students who take on anti-racism as a practice within their research, reflexively, epistemologically, methodologically, and politically, focusing particularly on work in urban contexts.
Potential topics proposed by panelists could include:
-Urban Afrofuturism(s) and anti-racist worlding
-Anti-racist methodologies
-Critical epistemological practices
-Anti-racist and public pedagogies
-Positionality and anti-racist ethics
-Anti-racism and fieldwork
-Anti-racism and public scholarship
Submission Procedure:
Graduate students who are interested in taking part in this roundtable discussion should submit two questions that guide your research, as well as a brief synopsis (300 words max) outlining how you integrate anti-racism politics into your urban geographic research and praxis. The questions that shape our discussion will be drawn directly from the submissions of selected panelists. Accepted panelists will also be asked to submit 4-5 annotated references that inspire your research. These annotated sources will be distributed among panel participants to help broaden the range of sources we use in our work and will be made available to audience members as a ‘take-away’ from the session.
If you are interested in participating, please send your submission to Rachael Baker ([log in to unmask]) and Emma Slager ([log in to unmask]) by October 18, 2017. Selected participants will be notified by October 20, 2017 and will then need to register for the 2018 AAG by October 25th. Please note that this is a panel session, so you will not need to submit an abstract to the AAG for this session though you will need to register and provide the session organizers with your PIN. AAG registrants may be a panelist in one session, in addition to one session for which they submit an abstract.