Abstracts accepted in English, Portuguese and Spanish.
Anindita Datta
Maria Anne Fitzgerald
The racial bias within the discipline of Geography acknowledged as ‘whiteness’ favours particular locations, institutions, names, standpoints, policies, gender, religion, colour, language, and scholarship (Shahjahan & Edwards 2022). Such whiteness generates structured geographical knowledge in need of “worldling” (Müller 2021). As women of colour and feminist geographers of the Global South, we contend with Audre Lorde’s words that caring for oneself within these preferential knowledge systems is political and simultaneously a critical ‘act of survival’. Following Lorde, we emphasize self-care and allyship as strategies of self-preservation and transformation in global academia. Our session encourages a critical discussion on resisting whiteness as producers of geographical knowledge. We note that whiteness silences diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism and vernacularization in classrooms, graduate/post-graduate programs, faculty hiring, publications, granting of awards/funding, promotions, and tenure among others. This ‘writing off’ maybe seen as a socialized form of the reproduction of whiteness in global academia. Breaking out of this doxic practise to reclaim spaces in the global academy demands writing from below and making space for polyvocal conceptualizations within geography.
Our session strongly advocates for self-care and allyship as strategies which potentially disrupt maintained and exclusive ‘white’ spaces of the global academy. Such reflections open up alternative geopedagogies in which geographical knowledges may be co-produced, shared and exchanged.
Sub-themes for discussion include, but are not limited to:
• Strategies for self-care in academia
• Spatial and temporal shifts in allyship within the academy
• Self-preservation and belonging in academia
• Subverting whiteness as a structural advantage
• Self-care and geographical knowledge production
• Invisible microaggressions within the academy
• Polyvocality of geographical concepts
• Geopedagogies from the Global South