Annual Cluster Conference "Spatialities": Keynote - Katherine McKittrick

Annual Cluster Conference "Spatialities": Keynote - Katherine McKittrick

Title: Annual Cluster Conference "Spatialities": Keynote - Katherine McKittrick
Abstract: "A Black Sense of Place": An ICDL Keynote Conversation with Prof. Katherine McKittrick

This keynote conversation with renowned Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick, that took place at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence's Annual Conference 2023, considers knowledge production processes and research practices from specifically Black spatializing vantage points, which are relevant to the transdisciplinary field of African Studies. The term 'field' is itself a spatial term concerning the conceptualisation of African Studies as a plethora of knowledge production sites which encompass epistemic perspectives from geopolitical and geophysical locations on the continent and the diverse African diasporas.

McKittrick's "Dear Science and Other Stories" (2021) combines poetic approaches with an erudite Black epistemic politics concerned with Black histories and how these have contributed to the intersectional spatialization of bodies read as Black. Here the term 'Black' transports more nuanced political, poetic and intellectual aggregates of being - rather than a mere racial category built on colonial logics. Thus this conversation is meant to sound and map distinct Black epistemic values through intersectional readings of power relations in structural, cultural and disciplinary sites of knowledge production. Notably the concept of the intersection and its accompanying socio-political and epistemic identity vectors are in and of themselves spatialising metaphors.

https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/news/2023/2023-10-31-Cluster-conference/index.html
YouTube playlist: Conference Spatilities 2023
Date: November 30, 2023
Language: English
has URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8TbzC8csUU
Transcript: so uh hello everyone um I'm caught up in a Time Loop here um I welcome you very warmly to this lecture um my name is Professor Stefan I'm an economic geographer I'm also Pi in the cluster and it is my honor to chair this meeting uh the icdl keynote conversation with Prof professor Katherine mckitrick icdl actually stands for intersectionality and critical diversity literacy lecture which is housed in the clusters directorate for gender and diversity which is headed by Dr Christine folk William and over the years we had several uh renowned Scholars gracing this series among them calias such as the late professor muku ofas VES some of you may remember that and I really recommend that you visit the subsection on the Clusters website to learn more about these past lectures uh today we are honored to welcome Katherine who will speak with us in a conversation about a black sense of place and by doing so by placing this conversation within the institutional locus of this a conference we live up to a recent call of Patricia Dy who gave the open keynote on Wednesday and Ember Mor namely to build a stronger bridge between what is often to African studies a label we can critically discuss and the vibrant field of black geographies and I think Katherine is the ideal person for this as a the major thinker uh on black specialities and more generally one of the major thinkers on on uh space and place uh that is with us uh she's the Canada Research chair in Black studies she researches in the area of black studies of course and anti-colonial uh studies and also critical creative methodologies she authored demonic grounds her first book black women and the cartographies of struggle uh she also edited a very important book on Sylvia Wier on being humanist prais uh silia winter the Caribbean scholar uh who cannot be easily pinned down because she's covering a wide range of of topics and also co-edited the book with Clyde Woods the late Clyde Woods on black geographies and the politics of play which again was very foundational for the field of black geographies her Reon monograph GE science and Other Stories is an exploration of black methodologies and it will Loom large in this conversation but the conversation also party transcends this book she's uh also a former editor of the leading geography Journal antipode which again underlines how essential she has been for the discipline of geography and uh maybe a last note on on on her own work of institutionalizing black geographies as a field and and black studies more generally um she has done wonderful work at the macro academic level but also in very concrete place places like Queens University in Canada where together with Vanessa Thompson Joseph kamanga she heads the black studies group and she is also in the process of establishing I think very exciting a global black studies program that tries to move beyond the confines of North America and she always has been interested in Creative scholarship the that undermines the competitiveness ethos of academic institutions and its dark sides such as hierarchical relationships a gladiator scholarship fast publishing and poor reading and citation practices and I think Sylvia winter uh Paul Gilroy and some other Giants of black Studies have been major influences for her on this the conversation will be steered by Dr Christine F William whom herself is not just the director of set office but also a SCH of literature and cultural studies in her own right and I'm very grateful for this pairing and hand over to Christine for the conversation we have a few q&as uh towards the end of this one hour event and uh yeah thank you everybody for being here particularly uh professor mckitrick and Christine who is in the room over to you we can't hear you we can't hear you Masters do something there the zoom Wizards now now we hear you we can hear you thank you indeed all right fabulous so you can hear my dulet tones once again welcome to uh this event it's been something that Stefan and I have been uh working on for quite some time it is my great pleasure and privilege to welcome Professor mckitrick to this particular space of broid Prof it's a pleasure to meet you albe it online I'm waiting for the day where we can actually share physical space that will be a privilege indeed um I have to say Professor M mckitrick dear science and Other Stories is a book that is very very close to my heart uh her uh precepts laid out in these particular mappings of black feminist geography and specialization are extremely important to my own work I've leared much and I look forward to learning even more at this conversation uh the book itself dear science and Other Stories combines poetic approaches with an aidite black epistemic politics concerned with black histories and how these have contributed to the intersectional spatialization of bodies red as black here the term black transports more nuanced political poetic and intellectual Aggregates of being rather than a mere racial category built on Colonial Logics thus this conversation is meant to sound and map distinct black epistemic values through intersectional readings of power relations in structural cultural and disciplinary sites of knowledge production notably the concept of the intersection itself and its accompanying sociopolitical and epistemic identity vectors are in and of themselves spatializing metaphors we are engaging here with entanglements between the Arts and the Sciences in this Valiant book with a view to envisioning and perhaps even generating some African studies research paradigms and practices which are more aligned with multilocality and multivocality of a black sense of place at intersections where power is scrutinized navigated negotiated resisted and reclaimed so without any further Ado Prof could you please share your thoughts with us on your conception of dear science and Other Stories as a means to draw attention to Black specialities how might such a volume as this be helpful in reconfiguring How African studies is practiced as a transdisciplinary field thank you can you hear me um thank you both I want to just before I attend to your question Christine I want to thank both you and stepan for inviting me here but also accommodating me I have a a kid with special needs and it's hard for me to travel now and so I'm I'm really honored to to join you from afar um and also just quickly thank you to the zoom Wizards and anybody else who's sort of supporting the the goings on of the conf conferences online and and and where where you are um so um to your question I'm going to repeat it maybe for for the the audience um share your thoughts on the conception of dear science as a means to draw attention to Black spatialities um particularly in relation to African studies and transdisciplinarity so I think one of the key questions or one of the key connections that I make in dear science is between disciplinary knowledge and the production of space after I completed demonic grounds I became incredibly interested in methodologies and thinking about how disciplinary knowledge especially but not only in the academy um was a a kind of a mapping mapping exercise so if we look at the establishments of departments or departmentalization we look at the history of how the University was built actually more broadly and what it does to contain knowledge um we can observe that knowledge and space are demarcated simult are are knowledge and space are are demarcated and produced simultaneously so here we can think of like just the the bones of a of an academic institution hallways signs office spaces Labs um and they produce a kind of spatial footprint that's in Tangled with knowledge on my campus for example I recently learned that the physics um the physics building um has really great water in fact it has better water than anywhere else on campus so we can think about this in terms of just like the Practical walking through the campus our business school is huge it's new um it's got it probably has good water too and make it makes me think about not only it just it makes me think about what the difference between good and bad water is at at my University but it also allows us to think about boiling water advisories in Canada particularly in indigenous um uh reservations um Water Crisis in southern Africa um and this like water kind of can hold us together um if we think about it so if the physics department has has great water what does that in a North American University what does that say about how physics is bound up in the production of knowledge and bound up in the production of space simultaneously and in my field I mean I've always kind of told this as a as a joke but not a joke but in my field or my interdiscipline which is black studies and gender studies some anti-racists have bigger offices than other anti-racists and I think I've thought a lot about that for many years in terms of who gets funding and why um from the federal government and how does that kind of uphold a particular type of knowledge um that isn't anticolonial for example um so once we make this connection between knowledge and space we can momentarily open up the ways that radical interdisciplinary knowledges or radic radical interdisciplinarity has the can possibly destabilize this Logic for me when we're doing our best interdis iary work we're not setting up a camp or bordering our knowledge systems um we're not resting comfortably within the walls of an already existing and calcified knowledge World which is often for many of us the academy um we're seeking out ways to enact or write about or struggle toward Liberation and this can be incredibly painful and uncomfortable to kind of breach those existing knowledge systems so a field such as African studies um like Caribbean studies or Asian studies or other other kind of um uh area studies type disciplines they hold a special kind of currency in the academy and it and for me the qu your question actually I'd never thought about this question until you raised it because I've thought about um I've thought about interdisciplinary knowledge like identity disciplines gender studies black studies African-American studies afro American studies and so on and so so forth like and I've thought about them in relation to Identity but your question really allows us to Grapple with disciplines that were produced in a kind of anthropological area studies logic that are beholden to the geographies that they that they are that they are studying and talking about um and doing field work within those those particular geographies um so this is a bold a bold suturing of African studies Caribbean studies Asian studies is a bold suturing of a geography to disciplinary knowledge um so it is implicit that African studies and knowledge produced within this field focus on Africa it's sort of implied whether or not the scholars within African studies do this doesn't matter the point is that the the the the six symbol and signifying work of the continent of Africa kind of tethers it to to the to the continent and we all know that Africa is not a bounded set of countries or that communities within the continent Africa are monolithic we know this we know that Africa is not a country as well which is sometimes how it's talked about if you're if you're coming from North America um we know that Continental borders are harmful uh and it's clear that a field such as African studies illuminates how meaningful geographies are to both disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge systems so there's a lot I think going on here like there's a your question is incredibly loaded um particularly because of the ways that we understand geography um how we understand um uh non-north American or what they call like Global North which is really uncomfortable in itself or Global North countries or and Global South countries and so on and so forth and how those get tied up in knowledge so in dear science and and across my research in the field of geography I've tried to point out and build on momentary destabilizations and one way to do this is to work through and draw attention to the ways black studies is inherently interdisciplinary and of course How African studies is nested in this inter disciplinary project through the diaspora and through um anti-colonial activities that are produced within the context of the continent itself um through work uh through producing intellectual and creative works that refuse nation and borders and nationalism and white supremacy and racism um so I this is a long way of saying that dear science is l interested in producing or upholding a field of knowledge um that might have a magical answer to our uh oppressive academic Fields um and I just want to also um it's worth repeating that interdisciplinary fields are also incredibly oppressive they don't always have this kind of you know they're also not magical um they're also incredibly exclusionary so um so I'm less interested in producing a field of knowledge that will you know fix our oppressive academic fields and more interested in activities that unsettle the geographic traces that actually make those fields possible um or Fielding possible MH thank you wow um um a couple of things are already occurring to me but I'll save it for later that's fine let's move on um you state in your introduction to the book that dear science is a study of I quote how we come to know black life through a symmetrically connected knowledge systems how might such knowledge then on our part help conceive of a decolonial epistemic trajectory in imagining black space and place as part of African contexts and life worlds which are necessary for the 21st century thank you for this question as well which is also loaded um thank you one of my favorite books is uh Simone Brown's Dark Matters and one of my favorite quotations comes at the very end of that book which is her question what happens when Blackness enters the frame and what happens of course is that the place and space changes like places and spaces change um when Blackness enters a room or a store or a Countryside these places and spaces shift effectively psychically and even physically they become Laden with new or different meanings um be precisely because Blackness holds in it all kinds of complicated histories and struggles that illuminate both black and non-black intimacies so Deon brand has a very famous almost over qued um line from a map to the door of no return where she says history is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives imagine writing that imagine what it took to kind of think that through and what what history is sitting there when a black person enters the room and we can go back to my earlier um comments on you know the business school the the physics department and what does it mean for a black person to walk through those Halls um and it's it's in it's it's it's unsettling it can be it it can be both liberatory and unsettling at the same time um so when we think about this in terms of actual geographies which is how I always try to ground my work I'm always like where is this happening not who is there what is there but where um then then I think that that that that allows us to kind of do this analytical work that you're asking us to do um so when I talk about asy asymmetrical knowledge systems I'm thinking about the entanglements between black and non-black communities which are unevenly expressed of course and lived very unevenly and how Blackness which carries this Monumental history of Oppression resistance and Liberation within it reshapes how we make place and therefore it sort of holds in it these anti Colonial possibilities they aren't guaranteed right ation is never guaranteed it's always unresolved this is what we learned from Sylvia winter and Paul Gilroy and others um but that struggle um to sort of expose those contradictions is incredibly important in terms of placemaking so therefore it's not just about what happens when Blackness enters the frame but it's also about how black folks experientially and empirically and optically engage the frame what do they do um the important thing for me is always in addition to kind of grounding ourselves in material geographies is like what kind of activities are taking place in those in those frames or in those geographies that seem to be so static how do black folks agentively remake place and space even if I even if this is at the level of the imagination right because the imagination and the psyche is a are kind of geographic scales um so part of my work has always been to Think Through how black women and other anti-colonial thinkers totally reconfigure how geography is conceptualized because of how they live and read and take up space and place um one of my very first questions when I was a PhD student and I was sitting in Lind peak's feminist geography class was about Tony Morrison's The Bluest Eye and I started to think about Claudia as a young black girl navigating Lorraine Ohio and what she did on those streets and what the home looked like and what the breed lov's couch looked like and all of this kind of all these geographies that kind of made her World um and pcola's world and so on and so forth um and I thought what kinds of geographies does Claudia for Morrison's Bluest Eye offer and how does her sense of place overlap diverge and undo those geographies that constrain and discipline and despise young black girls um and that was a mindblowing moment for me um because it simultaneously showed Claudia's agency within this context of like within a within geographies of duress right um so how do radical black folks and radical anti-colonial folks cast out you know existing Geographic models that are so invested in coloniality and ownership um and you know and owner here ownership always has this Preamble like you can't belong unless you own something um and so how do they not do that how do how do black and anticolonial thinkers not rely on ownership to advance a mode of belonging or how do ra radical black folks and other anti-colonial offer a version of geography that is cooperative and there I'm stealing from Clyde Woods um uh shifting uh provisional improvisational um and a set of activities rather than a static static place so those are some ways for us to think about about your question thank you again I could jump in there but I'm not going to I will restrain myself because we also have to watch the time but let's move on to the next question um as as you've probably noticed I've I've sort of jumped into the text and uh really uh taken out some some of these very appealing chunks here so um here we go from from Pages 120 to 121 of D science you map out the need for reflecting on disciplinary and epistemic relationality now relationality is one of the Clusters core principles um how might a black sense of place as practice relate to more intersectionally complex consciousness of knowledge production as relational practice thank you thank you for this and one of my favorite also one of my favorite ways to think about black geographies is through relationality and I love a good relationality question so thank you for this beautiful question um sense of yes it's like yay um a black sense of place is something I mean I'm still thinking through this concept and I think you might find it in some of my earliest writings like the paper on Tony Morrison's bluest ey I'm not sure or an early paper on black Canada and it's so it's an ongoing concept and it's my attempt to think about diaspora as method and I had this very kind of I don't know like dreamy idea that one day I would be able to figure out diaspora as a method rather than as just a as a concept and I'm not there yet so black black sens of place kind of stands in for that um it's it's an attempt to Center fleeting movement and displacement as an alternative knowledge application uh it's an idea that I'm still working out as I mentioned but the key for me and what I've learned from black Scholars is that focusing on activities and contexts is incredibly useful uh a black sense of place is a provisional meth method precisely because it is relational so glissant Edward Gant taught us that relation is not easy or fun or knowable I mean he kind of gives us that clue and it's this terrifying moment as an academic where you're like this isn't an answer are you kidding me thank you for nothing but because but because it's provisional and because it's an activity that's what we have to sit with and that's what we have to live with um so it's a shifting and painful and opaque activity if relation and relationality are sets of activities that change or mutate according to context a black sense of place which is where we know from not it's not about who we are but where we know from this must remain terrifyingly open um and change and open to change open to failure um and that liberatory promise that what we're working toward may never be realized and so relationality allows us to think about Liberation or Freedom as a process rather than as a goal or an outcome and I'll just like I'll just like add something here which is the University demands learning outcomes that are stable and knowable and transparent we all know this and so relationship ity is a way to undo that I think um as is a black sense of and there as is a black sense of place as are a number of Concepts you know I'm thinking as well about Edward soja's third space there's a lot of a lot of work around this but it's all everything all of these ways of thinking about producing knowledge with an outcome that is um not something that we can grasp but rather something that we do is is is very very useful for me um if the if the LI if Liberation is something that we can realize then we're probably not doing the right kind of work um in terms of intersectionality I I do shy away from using intersectionality and that's not because I don't like it as a concept it's because I I feel like I don't know enough about intersectionality in terms of Kimberly crenshaw's work as well as Patricia Hill Collins um and and the kind of good work that's done on this concept but it is also useful uh framework to to talk about the doing of anti-colonial work um particularly if we insist that intersectionality isn't stable but it's stretchy um rather than implying that it's un an unchanging analytical frame that you can apply in the same way across time and space um a good example of this is that if you teach inter SE sectional to first year undergraduate students it'll be framed in one way but if you're teaching it to you know a PhD student you'll probably frame it in a different way right and so it's kind of this expansive like it's something that kind of Moves In and Out it's expansive and then it kind of gets put back into place and expansive and so to think of it in as as a shifting frame is very very helpful and I think the Brilliance of Kimberly khaw um work on intersectionality and her gift is that she tells us in her 1989 paper that it shifts according to place and she uses the crossroads as as her as her metaphor and so if we believe as I do that metaphors always have material traces in them then she's actually talking about roads and Crossroads um and so and so this is and for her this is where the unresolved contradiction of black Womanhood resol resides but Crossroads shift according to time and place a crossroad in Canada is different than a crossroad in Germany um so we can think about it that way so what if we think about intersectionality as a place and not a person um and I don't think I'm like the first one to say that I think that that's you know if you're framing this whole conference around the continent of Africa the complexities of Africa as they're Tethered to intersectionality that's another example of how this intersectionality is a place um and again I I'll say I don't think any of this kind of theorizing is easy it's it's hard it's hard because we live in a world where we are supposed we are supposed to resolve things where intersectionality is the answer that it will give us Liberation um and so it's it's a struggle and holding on to that struggle is not e it's not easy for me I don't think it's easy easy for anyone um we're looking for a way to to resolve our Agony and we're we may not be able to do that so yeah thank you um yeah there's so many more questions I could sit here for two days and actually have conversations with you uh yeah I I can't wait for us to share space physically I'm just going to say that again I've I've just been told however that that um we only have another five minutes and um uh yeah yeah so strict timekeeping here Katherine sorry about that but there we go um so I would then like to ask if there are any questions in the room uh if we would be given some a little bit of generosity maybe two questions two pressing questions two burning questions okay okay okay so so we we can continue until 5 okay all right we okay they're insisting we've got 15 minutes to for questions so there we go people take it away Now's the Time 15 minutes all yours golden 15 minutes going once going twice come on don't don't make me beg please what's going on ah yes okay we have a question from the zoom uh and here it is um Katherine here it comes what is your interpretation of the term African space what is your interpretation of the term African space I love that I love thinking I mean immediately when I saw that in the chat I immediately thought of one of my students who's working on Space studies so the cosmological space and thinking about space and space travel of course I don't know much about space travel and I don't know much about Rockets or anything like that but I have to say that African space immediately took me up to the sky um uh and once again I'm not a physicist so I don't know anything about like Stardust or anything I think one of the I think African space can be thought of in a number of ways um one is to uh imagine I mean what I I'd like to think of it through a kind of borderless understanding of the continent of Africa so how do we and I think this is this is not you know African studies isn't isn't my field and I'm okay you know obviously admitting that but in terms of geography how do we think about the continent of Africa in terms of that um a kind of wholehearted colonial project that produced the conditions for us to not want to replicate that coloni that Colonial thinking in terms of the geography so how do we think about the borders of Africa as simultaneously uh strict and poorest um and again I'll go back to thinking about exposing the contradictions of these geographies they're not geographies where porousness is going to resolve anything or where strict borders are going to resolve anything but conceptually how can African space because you ask about space and not place and I think that that's important um how can African space kind of do that conceptual work for us and there it might be then attached to Diaspora um and this this moment of incredibly violent Exile that also kind of bounces back and redefines the continent of Africa and moves forward um and allows us to think about more contemporary migrations of African communities to North America and parts of Europe so I think that that's I mean it's not I don't think that I I have to admit I don't love my answer but I think those are the kinds of entanglements and possibilities that African space allows us to think about um a kind of openness that is produced through enclosure yeah thank you um um I think we all agree we're not looking for tidy answers and con Ive arguments I think we have space for openness and messiness because hey that's life that's we all right any more questions yes ah yes indeed uh what what yes please speak you have the floor thank you thanks so much for uh the conversation and for being here uh really inspiring and um I was kind of struck by your notion of um black studies and Liberation uh you know not relying on a sense of ownership uh but rather being open sort of also with regard to belonging and there are of course a lot of references to that in Black studies and I mean we you know them all uh but I was wondering about sort of the relationship with indigenous studies and the question of land that is so Central also many political debates also actually in Africa but of course in Canada as well and elsewhere you see sort of that relationships relationship in terms of De Colonial critique thanks thank you so much for your question it's a real Canada question um which I think we're you know as a I'll just repeat that we're still grappling with um one of the so I think there are two ways to answer this question the first the first way to answer the question is to kind of go back to G Gant where I will be a heretic and say and winter as well and I will be a heretic and say that you know um transatlantic slavery and dentur ship and colonialism produced new worlds including new geographies um wherein uh indigenous black non-black um and white settlers sort of became entangled in this this way that is incredibly painful and terrible and that produced something new in terms of how we understand property how we understand space how we understand geography and so on and so forth and so what if we take that terribleness as our starting point to think about our relationships with each other um and what that does is it obfuscates um uh an understanding of indigeneity that is from the time of Memorial right um whether on the continent of Africa or elsewhere it it asks us to shift how we under understand the land in relation to the land and belonging um as something that is that we've kind of that we've kind of been thrown into together so that's one way to answer the question which is to kind of focus on that moment of painful encounter um between multiple communities the other way that I think about that question I think for me is is doing the decolonial work that you asked about um particularly as academics um or as non-academic intellectuals and organizers and one of the things I've noticed in my university around black studies and Indigenous studies is a a real commitment to bifurcating these disciplines um um you know make having them compete for funding you know so so there's a decolonial scholarship black studies gets two indigenous studies gets three right like this kind of thing compete for funding um assuming that they're not connected in the way that I said earlier through that terrible encounter um and so on and so forth and I think one of the part of the work ahead is to to really commit to positioning black and Indigenous studies as not through the not through identity but through their anti-colonial struggles for Liberation I think the moment that we shift away from Identity and race because that gets tricky in Canada there are you know there's a card system for indigenous folks you know Somali folks in in Toronto are being um you know uh carded um from the continent of Africa are being carded more than perhaps those from other countries and things like that I think it's important to notice notice how Africa kind of app African indigeny appears in Canada and what is done with it and it gets kind of transformed into this quote unquote africanamerican gangster thing because of the ways that people are using the Optics of Blackness or the Optics of indigeny to understand how these communities relate but also to understand how they're completely different and part of the anti-colonial work and you can think about this through Leanne basaki Simpson um Robin Menard um norzi Phillip as well as other folks who kind of say like we're in this together like we're we're fighting colonialism together for our Collective Liberation right and that shifts it away from Identity and the crudeness of some kinds of identity politics not all um to a a kind of more capacious and generous but um intense um Rebellion against those systems that that insist that we're different I hope that helps yeah yeah she's nodding so it's all good all right okay who else another one H yes please do um thank you so much uh for the conversation it's been really generative um and I had a question around thinking of black geographies um because in my department we are trying to create a reading group uh and so I'm in the South African context and we've sort of titled black with a question mark uh because of you mentioned now uh non-university intellectuals so in the South African context referring to black geographies as a like as a container and a naming can sometimes be excluding of others who might not find that term useful especially when you said that ethnicity is tricky you talked about Canada and there are a lot of similarities with South Africa so how do we sort of deal with that term that in we might be comfortable in how we are thinking of it in an expensive way but in other context in the context where we want to have these conversations so they would I don't know it's not useful to have the conversation of around black geography only in the University context it has to actually filtrate to the people who are also experiencing it on the daily who are outside so how do we grapple with how the term can potentially exclude the very people we want to include yeah yeah thank you for that great question and yes so much yes to to these these kind of complicated relationships between the university and not so the first thing I would is say read Ruth Wilson Gilmore's abolition geography um either the short essay or the the the whole book if you can there's a short essay um in uh oh I won't remember the name of the the piece or the the edited collection but now there's the the full book and also the work of Clyde Woods who is also um Stefan uh brought up in the in the introduction um why these two authors because because they insist that black geographies um are always already produced through the dynamism between the the academy and organizers always um and so they provide us so does Bobby Wilson um but they provide us with the grammar to insist that the black and black geographies isn't academic only um it is about the relationship between academics and organizers Clyde Woods has this beautiful moment in development arrested where he talks about so it's this kind of really thick and almost like it's the font is small it's hard to get through this book um but there his talking about the blues he calls it a blues epistemology and so one of the ways that he sort of upholds or kind of under like what underpins his entire an anal is of the plantation economies in the south of the of the United States is to rely on blu's um musicians who provide the critique that set the stage for his entire kind of study his entire academic study so here again we can't you know it is a lesson um in how we have to think across we have to think about Blackness as a capacious opening to study Liberation um and so I like the idea of black question mark geographies um and also you know insisting that black is a signifier and it's not you know what if what if black if Blackness is a place rather than a person if Blackness if black geographies is a is a is actually a place and a about plac making then perhaps it can move outside um or shouldn't say perhaps it should always move outside the the walls of the academy The Poets are going to provide us with the grammar for Liberation much more quickly than academics are I'm sorry but I think it's true buzy Phillip is gonna Pro is going to is gonna offer me a lesson in getting free much more quickly than some academic um and so this is a way of also thinking about committed organizers um people who are doing on the ground work um and then setting up and then I think part of that work then is therefore setting up a set of conversations that always bring in that always decenter academic knowledge so always bring in the poets always bring in the organizers even if we disagree with the poets and the organizers they have to be part of the conversation you happy great so am I all right how you doing good yeah but we can carry on the conversation at later date I'm thinking uh Katherine thank you so much uh can we have a round of applause please for our thank you guests [Applause] yes um thank you so much for those questions they have enriched this encounter we have just this time but it was the one golden hour that we had thank you so much for all of you to take time from your coffee breaks and come out with us and actually have this valuable conversation it will continue and uh what can I say Stefan Katherine I wish you were here I'd give you both hugs but hey virtual hugs from me and yes I will see you all very soon thank you so much please go out and enjoy your break before the next session thank you thank you so much for having me what

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