Abstract

Black in Geography student-led series – Friday, October 22nd at 4 PM BST on Zoom.

Black History Month Panel: Centring Blackness through Access and Research Practice

The Black in Geography seminar is a series organised by students in the Geography department at the University of Cambridge. We invite Black geographers (lecturers and students) to speak on Blackness, foregrounding Black voices and experiences in a discipline rooted in coloniality and normative whiteness. Our seminars are informal and we do not record them, to create a safe space for open discussion.

In light of ‘Black History Month’ 2021, our conversation will be focused on centering Blackness through access and research practice. For this crucial discussion, we are delighted to welcome two speakers representing exciting initiatives in the field: Dr Jovan Scott Lewis, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair and Cynthia Nkiruka Anyadi, a first-year PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London, researching Cultural Geographies of death, memorialisation and material culture among Igbo Nigerians.

Dr. Lewis started the Berkeley Black Geographies Project in 2016, which advances a contemporary understanding of Geography and other disciplinary analyses of spatial relations through the centering of Blackness across the areas of programming, pedagogy, and publishing. Through proactive recruitment of graduate students and faculty, the project has come to represent the central intellectual and institutional heart of the department, for which Geography at UC Berkeley has become recognized as an institutional leader in the emergent discipline of Black Geographies.

Cynthia Anyadi is the Head of Partnerships at Black Geographers, a collective of Black Geography students and graduates formed in 2020 in the UK, highlighting the many barriers which prevent students from studying Geography and how isolating the field can be even after navigating these barriers. Black Geographers provides scholarships, resources, and internship opportunities, with the aim to improve representation, accountability, and access across schools and universities, as well as within Geography professions.

Following our panelists’ presentations and sharing of experiences studying and researching in the discipline, we will open the floor to the audience and hold an informal discussion and Q&A.

To attend the seminar, simply join the Zoom meeting on Oct 22, 2021, at 04:00 PM BST with the following link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86751221558?pwd=UG9ER0V0YXFwN1AvejdaejhUckREUT09

RSVP to the FB event: https://tinyurl.com/FBeventBlackinGeo.

Who are we? A group of Ph.D. students in the Geography department, at the University of Cambridge. Please feel free to contact us with any questions : Ed: emk31@cam.ac.uk ; Frédérique: flf25@cam.ac.uk; Matipa: mtm62@cam.ac.uk.