Recorded: No

Curated Track: 

Patricia Lopez, University of Washington

Description:

Drawing on and thinking with Indigenous geographies (Simpson 2014), Latine geographies (Caretta and Pepa 2023); Black feminist thought (Malaklou 2018; Olufemi 2021), abolition studies (Burns et al 2020; Moldonado and Meiners 2022), care ethics (Woodlly et al 2021), and political ecology (Barra 2024), these sessions ask how we continue to imagine, live in, and actively build otherwise worlds.

Organic intellectuals, community builders, activists, and academics have insisted for decades that we imagine and make space for otherwise worlds (Escobar 2016; Lethabo King, Navarro, and Smith 2020; Gan et al 2017). As some have pointed out, many of us are already actively doing this–in our classrooms (Caretta and Pepa 2023), in our research (Lloyd et al 2012), in our communities (Spade 2020; Crawley 2016), and in our everyday lives (Zibechi 2024; McTighe 2020). For some, the question of building worlds otherwise is ontological (Alberti et al 2011; de la Cadena 2015), for others it is epistemological (Ortiz 2022), for others it is ethical (de la Bellacasa 2017), and for many it is all three – an ethico-onto-epistemological question (Barad 2007; Meek and Morales Fontanilla 2022). As a question in the academy, world building has made space to have difficult conversations about what the future university holds and for whom (Boggs et al 2023), has given space to imagine a “third university” (paperson 2017), and has centered spaces like the undercommons (Harney and Moten 2013). In drawing on this work, we ask how we imagine otherwise worlds in the academy when the structures of late liberalism position peoples in opposition to one another (Povinelli 2011; Brown 2015). This opposition occurs on multiple and entangled scales, manifesting in recognition (Coulthard 2014; DuBois 1935) and resource distribution (Taylor 2019), among others, and suggests settler colonial racial capitalism is a zero sum game (Day 2015). This, we argue, limits the kind of care-ful, critical, and engaged scholarship and being that shows us another university is possible.

Building worlds otherwise necessarily asks questions of time, place, and scale–geography matters! In so doing, we ask where, how, and at what scale we can do, imagine, and actively work toward otherwise worlds? What are other geographies of otherwise worlds? To be clear, when we use the term geography, we mean it in the broadest possible sense – not just about the discipline.

Non-Presenting Participants