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

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Description:

Sponsors: Queer and Trans Geographies SG, Cultural Geographies SG, Feminist Geographies SG, Latinx Geographies SG

Discussants:
Debanuj DasGupta (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Edgar Sandoval (Williams College)

In a world defined through globalization, cultural structures and social relations are perceived and enacted through an unstable international lens. Transnational lives may occur across nation-states, or locally as people enact social and material change. Not only are singular and traditional categories of identity challenged, but experiences of self are put into flux, as the abstraction of space and time is made more palpable. As Dorren Massey (2005) claims, "The regulation of the world into a single trajectory, via the temporal convening of space, was, and still often is, a way of refusing to address the essential multiplicity of the spatial. It is the imposition of a single universal." Geographers are tasked with considering the implications of ever-shifting spatial-temporal contexts, and developing frameworks that identify and embrace pluralistic approaches to research and understandings of the world.

As such, we take up feminist transnational approaches. M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) advocates for a "pedagogies of crossing" which puts into question imperialist/capitalist structures and boundaries that often flatten difference in favor of singular, teleological renderings of transnational life. By examining hegemonic shifts that demand we build connections outside of ourselves, Alexander calls for theorizing from positions that challenge the centering of Christianity's hegemony and its influence on modernity and heteronormativity, and the resulting categorical logics that structure hierarchy in the Western world and academy.

References:

Alexander, M. Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Perverse Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Massey, Doreen. 2008. For Space. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Non-Presenting Participants