Conference Description

The 2023 USF MaGrann Conference is centered around the emerging subfield of Black Geographies. The conference will bring together scholars, activists, and artists from across Black diasporic spaces in the US, Brazil, and the Caribbean to support a growing global network of those interested in the study of Black geographies with those undertaking activist interventions against the racialized power dynamics that perpetuate devaluation, extraction, expropriation, and marginalization of Black lives and majority-Black places.

As the most recent spectacles of state violence have demonstrated, anti-Blackness remains deeply entrenched in the architecture of urban governance across the diaspora. More importantly, the ensuing national and global dissemination of protests against state violence—to distant places such as Dakar, Paris, Berlin and beyond, demonstrates that the dialectical relationship between anti-Blackness and the Black radical tradition remains globally resonant. Histories of state violence across the Americas (including Brazil, the United States, Haiti, and Jamaica) prove to be apt case studies to examine the articulations of racial capitalism and global racial regimes and how these regimes are spatialized in the concrete locales, spanning the urban-rural divide. This is especially so given these countries have long histories entwined with slavery and marronage, as well as their parallel contemporary forms of violent spatial confinement and rapidly growing Black social movements.

It is against this backdrop that we invite grassroots activists and scholars for our upcoming Global Black Geographies Conference, to be held at Rutgers University, New Brunswick from October 5-6, 2023, and in New York City Oct, 7-8, 2023.

The conference sessions- on Black Community Economies, Black Ecologies, Black Memory, Resistance and the City, and Abolition alongside Community-Engaged Scholarship- will highlight critical scholars and activists who foreground Black Studies epistemologies in their work, namely the practice of learning from the vital contributions of social movement participants in our collective knowledge production.

Keeping with Black Studies epistemologies, the conference will include spaces for somatic and creative practices intended to nourish and expand our individual and collective imaginaries and develop and strengthen scholar-activist collaboration across Black diasporic space.

USF 2022 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): https://www.urbanstudiesfoundation.org/funding/grantees/global-black-geographies-racial-capitalism-and-black-urban-experiences/