This workshop brought together threads of conversation around spatial reparation and repair in calls for financial reparations for the impacts of Transatlantic slavery and for ‘Loss and Damage’ in the unequal geographies of climate. Both these discourses pivot around an account of appropriate accountability in monetary terms in the context of an unquantifiable debt to alleviate continued structures of disadvantage and inherited geotrauma. There is growing work in geography on the ways that geography (as a discipline) and geographies (as specific spaces/spatial relations) perpetuate colonial infrastructures and have a role in reparation and nonrenewal. And reparative efforts on more local levels, often emphasise the role of geographies (e.g., segregation, spatialised environmental inequities, etc). Focusing in on materiality/geo-logics/geophysical reparation shifts an account of repair and restitution to the spatial and environmental dynamics that sustain subjective and sovereign states. It also foregrounds their on-going architecture and infrastructures of reproduction and renewal in geographic imaginaries and spatial practices. The workshop took the form of a round table discussion addressing a series of key questions about the racialized spatial dynamics of colonial and environmental inequities and strategies for their non-renewal.
Speakers included: IHSS Fellows Dr Archie Davies (QMUL) and Dr Elsa Noterman (QMUL), Dr Keston Perry (UCLA), Micheal Salu (House of Thought, Berlin) & Planetary Portals, IHSS Visiting Fellow Professor Christen Smith (University of Texas) and Professor Kathryn Yusoff (Co-director of Forum on Decentering the Human, QMUL).
Sponsored by the Forum on Decentering the Human and Critical Geographies: GEO research group.