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:

This is the first of two joint plenary sessions organized in the spirit of collaboration and repair by the Black Geographies Specialty Group and the journals Political Geography and cultural geographies.

The Reparative Conjuncture: Injury, Recognition, and Redress

Abstract: Discrimination and injustice are long-standing and chronic issues that many argue have facilitated the American development and progress. This functional process of societal injury-making has recently been called to attention in public discourse, activism, and even policy. Consequently, our politics have been consumed by demands for appropriate redress for these injuries, and resistance to those calls. I situate this moment as what I call a reparative conjuncture, meaning a moment where politics has come to recognize but struggles to reconcile the multiplicity of historical injuries that make up society. Identifying ways to adequately address the wide variety of inequalities is imperative. It is only through the study of reparations that a contemporary reckoning with injury can be assessed and theorized. To redress the historical and systemic harm, reparative politics and practice require a holistic and realistic assessment of what we hope to achieve and what must be done. In this lecture, I explore the terms of injury and repair that underpin our political present. Further, to understand the political and ethical limits of our political imagination, I argue for a reparations theory that explicitly addresses and accounts for how social, political, and geographic injuries can be more creatively addressed through an increased capacity of both material resource and political will for producing a radical and ultimately meaningful terms of repair.

Non-Presenting Participants