Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Lorena Muñoz, California Lutheran University

; ,

Description:

In the last few years, particularly with the creation of the Black Geographies and Latinx Geographies AAG specialty groups, junior scholars of color have openly claimed space in a historically white discipline, and have carved their own scholarly path by asking research questions and producing scholarship about and from their own communities. Feminist geographers have made significant advancements in disrupting masculinist and positivist forms of knowledge production and have created space for dialogue around researcher positionality, situated knowledge and scholar-activism (Nast, 1994; Rose, 1997; Nagar and Geiger, 2007; Pulido, 2008; Kohl & McCutcheon, 2014; Gökarıksel et al., 2021). We seek to extend these insights by exploring more deeply how geographers of color and of diaspora, come to our academic work and intellectual pursuit from a particular place (see Mahtani, 2014; Muñoz, 2010; Eaves, 2017). That “place” is often one of pursuit for social justice, community uplift, and recognition for both the harm that disproportionately white academia has historically done to exclude voices like ours from telling stories about the communities we come from. In this session we seek to embrace the blurred lines between researcher and community member, and ask our participants, invoking the words of the prolific Katherine McKittrick (2006, 2021) “Where do you know from?” And, where do you write from? What stories, what places, and whom do you carry in your heart in your scholarly pursuits and praxis?

In this session we aim to convene scholars of color whose work is explicitly situated in the beautiful, messy crosshairs of one’s own cultural, ethnic, racial identities and subjectivity, for those who are driven to do the work because of their life experience.

We ask:

Where do you know from? How does this influence the scholar you are, aim to be, and constantly becoming?

What does it mean to think, write, and do research from “within” a particular place, or experience, as a diasporic person? Or, from multiple places and experiences?

What does it mean to participate in the production of space and place, and make home, in the diaspora? Where does belonging begin?

What role does memory play in your scholarly praxis?

How does your own subjectivity, political commitments and relationships to communities influence your work? And how do they influence you?

References

Eaves, Latoya. 2017. “Black Geographic Possibilities: On a Queer Black South.” Southeastern Geographer 57 (1): 80–95.

Görkariksel, Banu, Michael Hawkins, Christopher Neubert and Sara Smith, eds. 2021. Feminist Geography Unbound: Discomfort, Bodies and Prefigured Futures. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

Kohl, E., & McCutcheon, P. (2014). Kitchen table reflexivity: Negotiating positionality through everyday talk. Gender, Place & Culture, 22(6), 747–763.

Mahtani, M. (2014). Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality. UBC Press.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2021. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Muñoz, Lorena. 2020. “Brown, Queer and Gendered: Queering the Latina/o ‘Street-Scapes’ in Los Angeles.” In Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, edited by Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash, 55-68. Abingdon: Routledge.

Nagar, Richa and Susan Geiger. 2007. “Reflexivity and positionality in feminist fieldwork revisited.” In Politics and Practice in Economic Geography, edited by Adam Tickell, Eric Sheppard, Jamie Peck and Trevor Barnes, 267-278. London: Sage.

Nast, Heidi. 1994. “Women in the Field: Critical Feminist Methodologies and Theoretical Perspectives” Professional Geographer 46 (1): 54-66.

Pulido, Laura. 2008. “Frequently (Un)Asked Questions about Being a Scholar Activist.” In

Engaging Contraditions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship edited by Charles R. Hale, 341-365. Berkeley: UC Press.

Rose, Gillian. 1997. “Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics.” Progress in Human Geography, 21: 305-320.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda