Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2024-06: Scholar-activists discuss various forms of radicalized geographies

In reviewing and evaluating the genealogy of development studies, professor, geographer and former chair of the Royal Geographical Society Uma Kothari emphasizes critical lenses and perspectives to challenge orthodoxies and highlighting "those concealed, critical discourses that have been written out of conventional stories of development or marginalized in mainstream accounts of ideas that have influenced contemporary understandings of development thought" (2019, 1). 

For the sixth Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2024, an onsite forum will take place -- a first since March 2020. The Forum on Radical Geographies brings together five scholar-activists in a panel that chronicles counter-cultural, radical, anarchist and emancipatory stories and narratives emanating from fieldwork in South Africa, the United States, Colombia and the Philippines. Happening on Friday, 28 June 2024 in PH 207 at 3:00 in the afternoon, with the following lineup of speakers:

Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City

Yousuf Al-Bulushi, University of California-Irvine

How are poor people in South Africa confronting the persistent legacy of apartheid spatial segregation? And what can movements across the world engaged in a global struggle against racial capitalism learn from the South African experience? This talk explores the relationship between shack dwellers and the African National Congress (ANC)-led government in South Africa. Grounded in the local realities of the struggle for housing and basic survival, the project makes broader interventions in national, continental and global debates about urban geography, African studies, social movements, and race. I argue that the shack settlement is emblematic of a democratic South Africa still profoundly shaped by apartheid's afterlife.

Yousuf Al-Bulushi teaches in the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His research engages political economy, political geography, and anti-systemic movements.

The Story of the Lungs, or How Atmospheric Racism Becomes Embodied

Pavithra Vasudevan, University of Texas-Austin

In these excerpts from my book, A Toxic Alchemy, I adopt Frantz Fanon’s description of colonialism as “atmospheric” violence to describe how racism becomes embodied through the inhalation of contaminated air. For Black workers in a southern US company town, whose lungs toiled to maintain life under the burden of toxic wastes, respiratory distress is symptomatic of an underlying pathology: a racist world that perverts the essential matter sustaining life into a tool of systematic violence. The story of the lungs reconsiders the body as a living archive of racist environments, and examines how biomedicine, in collusion with industry, is used to deny and dismiss Black lived experience. The struggle for breath and for clean air asks us to refuse capitalist dependence on disposability and demand a reimagining of the world. 

Pavithra Vasudevan is an assistant professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received the 2022-23 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for her first book project, A Toxic Alchemy: Race and Waste in Industrial Capitalism. Their research is grounded in creative praxis, employing performance, film, poetry and creative writing methods to reimagine scholarship as storytelling, in service to building a better world. 

Radical Performance Geography: Peace communities, international solidarity, and popular struggle in Colombia

Chris Courtheyn, Boise State University

This talk describes rural peace communities in Colombia and international solidarity activists who accompany their resistance to armed conflict, displacement, state violence, and capitalist extraction. I analyze nonviolent peace communities’ role in broader popular struggle in Colombia, in an effort to invite parallels and discussion about zones of peace and resistance to United States imperialism in the Philippines (as well as Palestine and beyond). Finally, I describe the methodology I call ‘Radical Performance Geography,’ which combines performance ethnography, radical geography, and feminist geopolitics as a spatially-focused form of participatory action research.

Chris Courtheyn is Associate Professor in the School of Public Service at Boise State University. He earned his PhD in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a BA in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Community of Peace: Performing Geographies of Ecological Dignity in Colombia.

Being Human is a Barrier: Work and Obsolescence in the Logistics Economy

Stevie Larson

Logistics is rapidly becoming one of the principal sectors of global employment, yet the operations and impact of logistics work remain largely occluded to the general public. In this talk I draw from excerpts of a manuscript in progress to highlight how the rising demands of online retail are transforming the fundamentals of this labor. Based on an ethnography of working at multiple Amazon warehouses over two years, I illustrate how both employers and employees increasingly participate in this field as a transactional economy of flex work, subcontracting and gigs - a logic of 'planned obsolescence' that heightens the contradictions of late capitalism.

Stevie Larson is a writer based in Atlanta, Georgia and former professor of sociology at Spelman College. As a member of the Team Colors Collective, Larson co-authored the book Wind(s) from Below: Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible and co-edited the anthology Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States. He is currently writing a manuscript on labor and logistics called No Mercy in the Land of Deliverance: Working at Amazon.

The Agrarian Question of Semi-Feudalism in the Philippines
Sarah Raymundo, University of the Philippines-Diliman
This intervention tackles semi-feudalism—-as both an analytical concept and a historical product of social investigation and class analysis—-that partly yet significantly frames the theory and practice of national liberation struggle in the Philippines.

Sarah Raymundo is an Assistant Professor at the UP Center for International Studies. She is the President of the Philippine-Bolivarian Venezuela Friendship Association. She undertakes political and educational campaigns with BAYAN as part of its National Executive Council. She organizes for the International League of Peoples Struggles.

Sponsored by the UP Department of Geography through the Human Geography research cluster, the Philippine Geographical Society and co-sponsored by the UP Center for International Studies, the Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a space of convergence where academics, activists, civil society and local collectives share stories and engage in conversations on topics that intersect broadly geographical inquiries in both theory and praxis. This forum continues the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the UP Department of Geography (1983-2023).