The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: Black Geographies Specialty Group Curated Track

Description:

Racial formations, (anti)racism, and urban change
Organizers: Sara Tornabene (University of North Carolina Charlotte) & Eric Sarmiento (Texas State University)

The concept of racial formation (HoSang et al., 2012; Omi and Winant, 2014) highlights the socio-historical production of racial identities, requiring intersectional analysis of cultural, political economic, and environmental processes and dynamics. As such, racial formation is an inherently spatial conception of race, grounding the contested construction of racial identities in particular geographies (Barra 2021; Cheng 2013). While racial formation occurs across a range of (often interconnected) spatial and temporal scales or extents, cities and urban development and change processes have shared an intimate and increasingly important relationship with racial formation in much of the world, as urbanization rates have rapidly increased and cities have come to play ever-larger roles in structuring political economy at all levels. Segregation, uneven metropolitan development, urban renewal, the expansion of the carceral state, and gentrification are just a few examples of the numerous ways that racialized struggle has both mediated and been shaped by urban change, with profound implications for racial identities, subjectivities, and cultural expressions.

This session convenes scholars and activists working to understand and make critical interventions in the socio-spatial processes through which racial formations and cities change together over time. We hope to foreground anti-racist perspectives and practices, while actively fostering engagement with past, present, and future experiments in more-than-capitalist urban development against but also beyond white supremacy.

References:
Barra, M. 2021. “Good Sediment: Race and Restoration in Coastal Louisiana.” Annals of the AAG 11:1 (266-282).

Cheng, W. (2013). The Changs Next Door to the Diazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

HoSang, D. M., LaBennett, O., & Pulido, L. (Eds.). (2012). Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (1st ed.). University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pn6cq

Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2014). Racial Formation in the United States (3rd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203076804

Non-Presenting Participants