Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Ashanté Reese, The University of Texas at Austin

; Nik Heynen, University of Georgia

Description:

Across the social sciences and the humanities, scholars use “Black ecologies” (Hare 1970) as an umbrella framework to document, analyze, and address a myriad of ecological concerns: eroding shores, food provisioning, climate-related disasters, mutual aid and community building in the wake of state failures, etc. (Allewaert 2013; Roane 2018; Roane and Hosbey 2019). Work focusing on the U.S. South highlights not only dispossession but also the varied, and often improvised ways communities fight to sustain and repair relationships, the earth, and the sea in the wake of the plantation (Bledsoe et. al. 2017; Eaves 2017; Wilson 2002). Guided and influenced by recent academic and activist work in Black ecologies that explores how communities attempt to restore relationships, lands, and waterways ravaged by capitalism, this session emphasizes experimentation (in form, in method, and in practice) and reparative restoration. Rather than presenting complete, final answers to a set of questions, the papers in this session will necessarily be in process, perhaps incomplete in their findings but all engage, document, and pursue “ways of living the world that are uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, imprecise and unrealized” (McKittrick 2021:5).

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda