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Key research themes
1. How do Black Geographies illuminate the spatial dimensions of anti-Blackness and inform diverse forms of Black spatial resistance and identity?
This research theme centers on Black Geographies as a critical intellectual and political project that foregrounds the spatial experiences of Black populations under racial capitalism and settler colonialism. It reveals how Black life, oppression, and resistance are deeply spatialized—manifested in segregation, surveillance, policing, racialized violence, and struggles for place-making—as well as the cultural and political imaginaries that Black communities create to assert belonging and liberation. The theme highlights Black Geographies’ interdisciplinary interventions that challenge mainstream geographic canons, address embodied and structural anti-Blackness, and promote plural conceptions of Black spatial practices essential for understanding racialized geographies today.
Key finding: This paper demonstrates that Black Geographies, through interdisciplinary scholarship, reveals how Black spatial experience encompasses themes such as space-making, racial capitalism, carceral geographies, and plantation... Read more
Key finding: By comparing three distinct US Black political movements (the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Black Panther Party, and New Afrikan Independence movement), this paper elucidates the diverse spatial aspirations and... Read more
Key finding: This commentary critically assesses the exclusion of Black scholars and Black thought within human geography and higher education. It problematizes calls for dialogue that ignore entrenched power and colonial legacies,... Read more
Key finding: Through an analysis of Black activism in 1990s Montreal, this paper reveals how race—rather than language or ethnicity—structures urban spatial divisions. It illustrates the politicization of Blackness that transcends... Read more
Key finding: This introduction emphasizes Black Geographies’ crucial role in revealing the 'materiality of racial exclusion' through geographic scholarship focused on the US South. It connects historical and contemporary racial politics,... Read more
2. How do settler colonialism and white supremacy shape the material and spatial production of racialized geographies?
This research theme investigates the ongoing structures of settler colonialism and white supremacy as foundational forces that produce and reproduce racialized spatial formations in settler societies. It moves beyond considering white privilege in isolation to a materialist and historical account of white supremacy as an active, spatially embedded process entailing land dispossession, racial violence, and socio-economic hierarchies. Understanding settler colonialism as an enduring structure reframes racial geographies through the lens of systemic elimination and property relations, offering critical insights into contemporary racial conflict and land struggles.
Key finding: The paper theorizes white supremacy not as a vestige of history but as an enduring, spatially grounded set of practices integral to settler colonialism. By contrasting white supremacy with white privilege, it situates racial... Read more
Key finding: This paper identifies the central role of white women in producing and maintaining white supremacist spatial orders in the US through gendered, racialized labor and discourses of ownership. It extends the concept of... Read more
Key finding: Focusing on a transitioning urban neighborhood in Buffalo, this study reveals how white racial privilege is actively and spatially (re)constructed and contested through microgeographies of everyday life. It demonstrates how... Read more
Key finding: This work highlights how social and cultural geography has produced 'toxic geographies' by marginalizing scholars of color and neglecting the materiality of race and racial violence. The paper critiques the discipline’s... Read more
Key finding: Drawing from community organizing, public art, and diasporic African American experiences in Portland, this paper develops the concept of a Black spatial imaginary as a mode of resistance to the persistent white spatial... Read more
3. What are the social and political geographies of racialized toxicity and embodied racialized experiences as forms of domestic geopolitics and racial feralization?
This theme explores the spatial and embodied dynamics of racialized toxicity and racialized violence as central to contemporary racial capitalism and its governance, through geographies of environmental racism, settler colonial neglect, and state violence. It foregrounds the concept of domestic geopolitics to analyze how Black communities resist and navigate toxic conditions, and introduces racial feralization as a critical framework capturing race’s role in biopolitical control and urban marginalization under planetary urbanization. This approach rethinks geopolitics to include intimate, reproductive, and survival struggles that embody spatial racial violence and resistance.
Key finding: This oral history study reveals how African American narrators recall and negotiate racialized spatial controls such as Jim Crow laws and social customs governing movement in public spaces. It illustrates the racialized... Read more
Key finding: By studying Black communities in Badin, NC, and Flint, MI, the paper develops 'domestic geopolitics' to integrate analyses of internal colonialism, Black feminist social reproduction, and racialized toxicity. It argues that... Read more
Key finding: This theoretical article introduces racial feralization as a concept linking planetary urbanization and race, where racialized populations are problematized as dangerous, unruly, and threats to social order. It traces the... Read more
Key finding: This study integrates psychological research with critical race geography to argue that physical space is a racialized cultural product shaping mental imagery of race that influences perception and interaction with... Read more
Key finding: This article approaches segregation and racial diversity in US metropolitan neighborhoods not as binary opposites but as coexisting and interrelated phenomena. Using compositional diversity alongside racial dominance metrics... Read more