What follows is a collection of work by Black geographers, and additional recommended readings on Black geographies and anti-Blackness in the United States and Canadian contexts. It is by no means a comprehensive or exhaustive review of Black scholarship in this area.
This has been compiled by students, faculty and staff at UBC Geography.
We recognize that we as a department have a great deal more work to do in order to directly support scholarship on race, and Black scholarship in particular.
This list marks a small effort to use the privilege we have – knowledge and a platform – to uplift Black scholarship within our own community and beyond.
Work by Black Geographers
- Black Geographers in Institutions of Higher Education in the United States: Where they are and a selected bibliography of their works, compiled by Joe Darden and Lucia Terra in 2003
- Ellis Adjei Adams; geoscience and global water security
- Samuel Agblorti; disaster risk management and migration
- Jemima Nomunume Baada; the intersections of gender, climate change, migration, health and development equity
- Caroline Bressey, particularly her work on ‘looking for Blackness’
- Salome Buglass, marine ecologist working on marine resource management & biodiversity in the Galápagos
- LaToya Eaves, Black geographies, Black feminism and queer studies. Co-founder of the Black Geographies AAG Specialty Group
- Rachel Goffe, urban geographer
- Jonathan C. Hall, condor conservation, wild food ecologies
- Peter James Hudson, history of capitalism, intellectual and political-economic history of the Caribbean and the Black world, history of Black radicalism and global anti-imperialism
- Zenzele Isoke, urban ethnographer
- Tiffany King, abolitionist traditions, decolonial studies, Black feminisms (interview with Feral Feminisms)
- Sophie Sapp Moore, who co-organized the Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene
- Aaron Mallory, Black Queer health, missing geographies of Black communities in the United States South
- Katherine McKittrick, Canada Research Chair in Black Studies
- Beverley Mullings; feminist political economy
- Patricia Noxolo, lead researcher on the Carribbean In/securities and Creativity research network
- Arrianna M. Planey, health/medical geography, healthcare access & inequities
- Andrea Roberts, founder of the Texas Freedom Colonies Project
- Ashanté M. Reese; critical food studies and food justice (interview with Antipode Online)
- Rashad Shabazz; human geography, Black cultural studies, gender studies and critical prison studies
- Deondre Smiles, Indigenous geographies, science and technology studies, tribal cultural resource protection
- Daniel Tevera; urban studies and labour migration
- Rinaldo Walcott; Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality
- Bobby Wilson; industrialization and civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama
- Rita Yembilah; poverty and precarious livelihood
Reading Lists / Specialty Groups
- Black Geographies reading list created by Anna Livia Brand
- Reading Towards Abolition: A Reading List on Policing, Rebellion and the Criminalization of Blackness compiled by the Abusable Past Collective
- A Syllabus for the Present Predicament – “This reading list provides resources for situating the simultaneous manifestations of antiblackness and assault on Black life in the present.” Compiled by Adam Bledsoe, Jasmine Butler, LaToya Eaves and Alex A. Moulton.
- The Berkeley Black Geographies Project
- Black Geographies AAG Specialty Group, who have also curated a Black Geographies reading list
- Black Geographers – UK based group with resources for students, including a scholarship
Publications (free to access)
- The Negation and Reassertion of Black Geographies in Brazil by Adam Bledsoe
- Virtual exhibit: dying to eat? black food geographies of slow violence and resilience by Naya Jones
- Visceral Geographies of Whiteness and Invisible Microaggressions by Joshi, McCutcheon and Sweet
- Making Room for Black Feminist Praxis in Geography: A Dialogue between Camilla Hawthorne and Brittany Meche
- Black Geographies: Mapping Black Spaces and Places, drawn from the work of Katherine McKittrick
- The Geographies of Blackness and Anti-Blackness: An interview with Katherine McKittrick
Protest, policing and the carceral state
- Canada Has Race Based Police Violence Too. We Don’t Know How Much.
- The perils of being black in public: we are all Christian Cooper and George Floyd by Carolyn Finney
- Courage Under Fire: Handcuffing and Gagged by the Streets by Yvette LaShone Pye
- Here are the freedom songs of the Movement for Black Lives by Willie Jamaal Wright
Racial capitalism
- Racial Capitalism, the Free Trade Zone of Pacific Alliance, and Colombian Utopic Spatialities of Anti-Blackness by Jaime Alves
- The Anti-Blackness of Global Capital by Adam Bledsoe and Willie Jamaal Wright
- Labor’s Aphasia: Towards Antiblackness as Constitutive to Settler Colonialism by Tiffany King
Urban geographies
- Urban Geography: Understanding Black Cities and the Black Experience in Cities by Adam Bledsoe and Willie Jamaal Wright
- Engaging Black People and Power: A Public Engagement and Urban Policy Primer by Jay Pitter
- A Way Out of No Way: Struggles for Economic Survival in Black Milwaukee by Hilary Wilson
Publications (paywall / require institutional access)
- The Practice of Slowness: Black Queer Women and the Right to the City by Kemi Adeyemi
- Cultural competence and cultural humility: a critical reflection on key cultural diversity concepts by Ransford Danso
- A So Black People Stay: Bad-mind, Sufferation, and Discourses of Race and Unity in a Jamaican Craft Market by Jovan Scott Lewis
- Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’ by Faria and Mollett
- “So high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it”: Carceral Spatiality and Black Masculinities in the United States and South Africa by Rashad Shabazz
Books
- Black Queer Studies, A Critical Anthology
- The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders and Citizenship
- Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the new Jim Code, by Ruha Benjamin (reviewed in Antipode)
- Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne
- Environmental Health and Racial Equity in the United States: Building Environmentally Just, Sustainable, and Livable Communities by Robert Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson and Angel O. Torres
- Toward a Global Idea of Race by Denise Ferreira da Silva
- Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors by Carolyn Finney
- Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean by Camilla Hawthorne
- Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean by Peter James Hudson
- The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany King
- Policing Black Lives by Robyn Maynard
- Race, Place and Risk: Black Homicide in Urban America by Harold Rose and Paula McClain
- Becoming Abolitionists by Derecka Purnell
- For A New Geography; The Nature of Space; The Shared Space: The Two Circuits of the Urban Economy in Underdeveloped Countries; and Toward an Other Globalization: From the Single Thought to Universal Conscience by Milton Santos
- Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta by Clyde Woods
Talks / Panels / Interviews
- Geographies of Racial Capitalism by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore in conversation with Rachel Kushner
- How to Program A Carceral City by Brian Jordan Jefferson
- Public Thinker: Katherine McKittrick on Black Methodologies and Other Ways of Being (in conversation with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
- Why Liberals Make Everything About Race, with Touré Reed on the Jacobin Show
- Reckoning with Our Racial Past: A Conversation with Kwame Anthony Appiah and Adolph Reed Jr.
- How do we respond to anti-Black racism in urbanist practices and conversations? Moderated by Jay Pitter
Podcasts
With thanks to Rachel Brydolf-Horwitz, JP Catungal, Jessica Dempsey, Michael Fabris, Albina Gibadullina, Kevin Gillard, Miriam Grant, Leila Harris, Micah Hilt, Mollie Holmberg, Bonnie Kaserman, David Ley, Minelle Mahtani, Terence Gary McGee, Isabella Pojuner, Geraldine Pratt, Juanita Sundberg, Gabriele Woolever, Elvin Wyly.
This is an evolving resource – please contact communications@geog.ubc.ca with additions, corrections or updates.
