RSS FeedUpcoming EventsGrant Farred | Diaspora-in-Place, April 2https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/236103-grant-farred-diaspora-in-place

This project stands as the mark of a previous insufficiency. In my recent monograph, The Perversity of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education, one of the concepts on offer is diaspora-in-place. The concept was, however, not brought into its fullness – it remained as a provocation, a provocation demanding address. Thus, this writing – this still provisional – rendering of the diaspora-in-place. The recognition that the diaspora, much as it turns on departure, leaving, the dream of returning, making a place in an unfamiliar locale, also possesses a different dimension. Contains within it a mobility-in-stasis. To leave without departing. To be gone while remaining in place. That is the condition that this presentation subjects to thinking.

 

Please Note: For the pre-circulated paper, please write to Patty Dunlap at pattydunlap@berkeley.edu

 

Speaker Biography

Grant Farred is a Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University and the author of Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football and T he Burden of Over-representation: Race, Sport, and Philosophy , and the editor of Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures (all Temple University Press), among several other books and pamphlets in theory, postcolonial studies, race, intellectuals, sport, and cultural and literary studies.

Sponsors

In generous collaboration with the Center for African Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of English, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Department of Geography, the Department of Political Science, the Department of Rhetoric, the Department of Sociology, the Institute for International Studies, the Irving Stone Chair in Literature, the Marion E. Koshland Chair in the Humanities, the Office of the Dean of the Social Science Division, the Rachel Anderson Stageberg Chair in English, the Social Science Matrix, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

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Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia, April 3https://events.berkeley.edu/geog/event/232237-subterranean-matters-cooperative-mining-and-resource-

In an era of increased state involvement in natural resource governance, members of Bolivia’s “mining cooperatives” are commonly described as thieves of national wealth. Nevertheless, these small-scale miners won significant influence in Bolivia’s radically restructured Plurinational State, in which the rights of both Indigenous peoples and Pachamama (Earth Mother) have been constitutionally enshrined since 2009. In this talk, which draws on my forthcoming book, cooperative miners are unorthodox guides to the tense coexistence of resource nationalism and plurinationalism in Bolivia – a coexistence made possible, I argue, by the vertical partition of land from subsoil. Drawing on ethnographic work with tin mining cooperatives in the Bolivian highlands, I trace the history of this partition and explore its contemporary influence. Centering labor as a site of analysis, I use the concept of “material history” to theorize connections between historical materialism and new materialities, and specifically to examine how the meanings historically sedimented underground shape cooperative miners’ individual bodies and their body politic, which is internally stratified along lines of race and gender. These intimate processes have national ramifications when cooperative miners take to the streets and run for political offices. Through this work, I demonstrate not only how cooperative miners help maintain Bolivia’s extractivist economy, but also how the inseparably meaningful and material qualities of natural resources shape political subjectivities and political economic processes.

Andrea Marston is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research examines the political economy and cultural politics of natural resources and energy systems. She is author of Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024).

https://events.berkeley.edu/geog/event/232237-subterranean-matters-cooperative-mining-and-resource-
Derived Landscapes? African diaspora in the making of a new European Urban Economy, April 10https://events.berkeley.edu/geog/event/232238-derived-landscapes-african-diaspora-in-the-making-of-

Analyzing the role of the so-called ‘African markets’ in transforming the urban economy of European metropolises is the central focus of the presentation at the colloquium. Through the study of Ridley Street Market, located in Hackney (London, UK), I aim to reflect on the organization of commercial activities established by West African immigrants, considering the scope of their activities and their impacts on the metropolitan space of London. This reflection prompts a proposed update to the concept of ‘Derived Landscapes,’ coined by the French geographer Max Sorre in the mid-20th century, in light of the dynamism exhibited by African immigrants in reshaping European urban landscape.

Kauê Lopes dos Santos is a Professor at the Department of Geography at UNICAMP (Brazil) and a Visiting Fellow at the Latin America and Caribbean Centre at LSE (UK). Santos is committed to conducting comparative studies in the Global South, particularly emphasizing urbanization and topics related to the urban and regional economy. His research focuses on case studies in Latin America and West Africa. Additionally, Santos is the author of “Africano: uma introdução ao continente” (2022) and “De l’or contre des déchets” (2022).

https://events.berkeley.edu/geog/event/232238-derived-landscapes-african-diaspora-in-the-making-of-
Abolition and the everyday life of Sacramento’s carceral housing crisis, April 17https://events.berkeley.edu/geog/event/243637-abolition-and-the-everyday-life-of-sacramentos

The movement for abolition has articulated a rejection of policing and prisons as a central part of a broader project to dismantle racial capitalism. In this presentation, I propose that a fight for universal housing can play a critical role in this movement. Through ethnographic work with those most impacted by policing, incarceration, and housing precarity in Sacramento, I demonstrate that the city is in the grips of what I name as a carceral housing crisis in which the punishing functions of the state participate centrally. Informed by those organizing against the crisis, I make a case for an abolitionist approach to housing that prioritizes collective ownership and autonomy over capitalist property relationships and state management.

Mia Karisa Dawson is an human geographer studying racial dynamics of policing, property, and protest in U.S. cities. Mia is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA and is an alumnus of the Geography Graduate Group at UC Davis.

https://events.berkeley.edu/geog/event/243637-abolition-and-the-everyday-life-of-sacramentos
Worlding and weirding with beaver: A more-than-human political ecology of ecosystem engineering, April 24https://events.berkeley.edu/geog/event/232239-worlding-and-weirding-with-beaver-a-more-than-human-p

Scientists and policy makers promote nature-based solutions to the interconnected challenges associated with the Anthropocene. Often these involve the strategic use of ecosystem engineers: animals, plants, and microbes with disproportionate ecological agency capable of regional or even planetary scale niche construction. This environmental mode of biopolitics is promoted as biomimicry: restoring, rewilding, or rewetting diverse ecological systems. This paper examines the multispecies relations promised by this model through a focus on beaver in Britain over the last 12000 years. It begins with beaver making Britain hospitable for early settlers and agriculturalists as they returned after the last ice age. It traces the subsequent demise of beaver due to hunting and land use change, and then follows the recent return of beaver as tools for natural flood management and nature recovery. It attends to situations in which these multispecies world making projects go awry in the weird ecologies of the Anthropocene. This story of beavers helps situate enthusiasms for proactive ecosystem engineering in deeper time. It highlights the beguiling potential of nature-based solutions while cautioning against tendencies towards anthropocentrism, an apolitical mononaturalism, and an ecomodernist hubris. The paper combines concepts from archaeology, ecology, anthropology, and geography into a framework for theorising multispecies acts of worlding and weirding.

Jamie is an environmental geographer whose research examines the production of environmental knowledge, and how this knowledge comes to shape the world around us. He focuses on powerful understandings of Nature and their consequences for human and nonhuman life across different spatial scales. Past projects have examined human relations with a range of organisms - from elephants to hookworms - and policy domains - including conservation, health, and agriculture. He combines concepts and approaches from more-than-human geography with those from science studies, using ethnographic, participatory, and historical methods. His research has been funded by the ESRC, The British Academy and the Wellcome and Leverhulme Trusts, amongst other sources.

https://events.berkeley.edu/geog/event/232239-worlding-and-weirding-with-beaver-a-more-than-human-p