Black Counter Cartographies
Friday, March 24, 2023; 4:00pm-5:30pm est.
Shanya Cordis - African American and African Diaspora Studies-Columbia University
and
Tia-Simone Gardner - Media and Cultural Studies-Macalester University
Virtual Event -Registration is Required
https://bit.ly/3IW70cW
Akin to the way that racial thinking marks and makes human difference, geographic knowledge and its modes of representation mark differences—above from below ground, land from water, here from there, mine from yours. The field of Black Geographies challenges and reimagines modernity’s production of space (and time), one that has been abstracted by the metrics of markets and politics. Black Counter Cartographies brings together diverse scholars, artists, and designers in a series of conversations exploring the spatial practices of Black life across the diaspora and how they construct “counter cartographies” of sociality, imagination, and liberation.
Speaker Bios
Dr. Shanya Cordis is a first-generation Black and indigenous (Lokono and Warau) Guyanese-American. Dr. Cordis is Assistant Professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Her manuscript Unsettling Geographies: Antiblackness, Gendered Violence, and Indigenous Dispossession in Guyana is a critical feminist ethnography that tracks how geographies of racial difference undergird indigenous recognition policies, extractive economies, and neocolonial capitalism, advancing the annexation of indigenous territories and entrenching antiblack logics.
Dr. Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist and undisciplined Black geographer committed to the celebration of Black Life. Dr. Gardner is Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural Studies at Macalester University. Working primarily with photography, moving-image, and drawing, her practice is deeply grounded in interdisciplinary strategies that activate ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. She is currently working on a photographic/writing project with her mother that juxtapose questions of biopolitics, Black Southern familial memory and geology with vignettes of extractive capitalism.
