Library Guides: Black Geographies: Berkeley Black Geographies

What is Berkeley Black Geographies (BBG)?

Berkeley Black Geographies is committed to the material study of Black life and guided by the principal assertion that Blackness cannot be reduced to cultural abstraction or mere corporeal phenomena. Geography is pursued as a productive analytic capable of exploring, examining, and determining the lived experiences of Blackness, its conceptual limits, and theoretical purchase. BBG approaches Blackness as an analytical modality that gives insight and shape to the concepts and processes of spatial formation. Race and place are understood as mutually constituted and operationally linked. Social and political processes are inherently determined by spatial relations that can never be fully understood without racial (understood as Black) analysis.

Berkeley Black Geographies Symposium (2020): The Black Geographic: A Geography of This Century

Berkeley Black Geographies Symposium (2017): Insurgent Knowledge, Spatial Poetics, and the Poetics of Blackness

Companion Article: Camilla Hawthorne and Kaily Heitz: A Seat at the Table? Reflections On Black Geographies and the Limits of Dialogue

Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference

The Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference promotes critical dialogue on the racial, ecological, sociopolitical, cultural, economic, and sociospatial processes that constitute the materialities of Black life and its everyday contours. The BGGSC foregrounds the geographical practices, knowledge, and interventions of African Diasporic communities while challenging, reorienting, and refuting racialized colonial conceptions of space, place, time, scale, diffusion, landscapes, and Black life. This collective gathering is designed for graduate students and advanced undergraduates to collaborate and engage with each other through Black geographical thought across disciplines, academic affiliations, and communities.