Black in Geography - Mobilities Across Boundaries

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• Dr. Rudo Mudiwa (UC Irvine), Dr. James Esson (Loughborough University), and Dr. Victoria Okoye (Sheffield Hallam University)
• Friday 21 January 2022, 17:00-18:30
• Zoom.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact mtm62.

The first Black in Geography student-led seminar of Lent term takes place on Friday 21 January at 5pm GMT on Zoom.

We have invited three scholars of international significance to discuss their diverse yet intersecting research in relation to this field. In opposition to narrow, colonial narratives and framings of Black mobility, this panel highlights the centrality – indeed the necessity – of Black methodologies and theorisations for an adequate conceptualisation of mobility within geography. The aim is to forge a path towards a truly global account of mobilities.

The panel will open with reflections from each of our three speakers on their current research. This will be followed by a Q&A.

The Zoom link to the panel will be circulated a few days before the event. Please register your interest to receive the link: tinyurl.com/BlackInGeo

Speaker biographies:

Dr. Rudo Mudiwa’s scholarship focuses on the promise that decolonization, as a movement and political process, held for African subjects. She is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. At present, she is at work on a manuscript titled A Nation of Prostitutes: Gender, Urban Space, and the Invention of Zimbabwe. This book will examine how the prostitute – a symbol of the mobile and transgressive black woman – mediated anxieties regarding the challenge of remaking urban space, policing, and gender relations in the wake of colonial rule. This research was supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton. In addition to her academic work, Mudiwa has published essays in Transition, Chimurenga, New Frame, Ebony, and Africa is a Country.

Dr. James Esson is a human geographer at the Department of Geography and Environment, Loughborough University. James’ research is currently focused on the following three areas: i) interrogating the conceptualisation of black African bodies in dominant understandings of human trafficking. ii) examining how migration statistics are produced, made credible, and used by the State to monitor migrant populations. iii) experiences of ageing in urban Ghana.

Dr. Victoria Okoye is a Black feminist geographer who draws on collaborative and arts-based approaches to think through questions of Black spatial experience and place. Her PhD was a collaborative project with Spread-Out Initiative, a youth-focused NGO in the Nima neighborhood of Accra, Ghana and involved participatory photography, mapping, storytelling, and site-specific intervention as means of documenting and reimagining with children their inhabitation of community space. Victoria is interested in (un)learning coloniality/modernity through global Black geographies, Black feminisms, and Black young peoples’ narratives in/of space. Victoria has a PhD in Urban Studies and Planning (University of Sheffield), and she is Lecturer in Human Geography at Sheffield Hallam University.

This talk is part of the Black in Geography student led talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• Black in Geography student led talks
• Department of Geography
• Zoom

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