Description

This session aims to attract participants whose work centers placemaking -- broadly conceptualized as the power-laden social relations that (re)produce meaningful spaces. Geographies of race, space, and difference examines places as important sites of contestation and negotiation over belonging, race/racialization, and identity. Seeking to understand which people and narratives are included and/or excluded in these processes of negotiations - what does placemaking offer to this analysis? With a particular interest in emerging trends and conversations surrounding placemaking as a diverse spatial practice, we welcome conceptual, theoretical, and empirical research. Our goal for this session is to bring together a range of people working on placemaking who otherwise might not see their work in the same session.

-Potential themes could include:
-Examining placemaking across different scales, contexts, and/or actors
-Social, political, and economic drivers behind placemaking
-Placemaking as construction of social categories and exclusions, along the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, or national origin
-Geographies of inclusion and exclusion
-Resistance and placemaking strategies
-Relational placemaking
-Creative placemaking/New cartographies
-Democratization of placemaking processes


Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words to Flavia Maria Lake (fmlake@ucla.edu) and J. Zoe Malot (zoemalot@ucla.edu) by December 1st.