We investigate the material, political and epistemological relationships between race, capitalism, coloniality, and the matter of bodies and the earth.
This involves delineating and examining the multiple historical geographies of racial capitalism, past and present, and how they shape lives and environments. It examines the implication of the geosciences and geologic thought and practice, as well as extractivism, meat production, and global divisions of labour, past and present, in indigenous dispossession, anti-Brownness and anti-Blackness. It involves critical analyses of the epistemologies of race and racialisation and their determinations of the changing and contested differentiations in and of space, nature, and the human and the non- or in-human. It examines material historical geographies of resistance to enslavement and dispossession, and moves towards mapping, translation and cultural production as methods of repair for racialized injustice. It means examining how racialized bodies are made through histories and geographies of hunger and pain, while delineating the anti-colonial epistemologies that have challenged those depredations.
The Forum on Decentring the Human carries out interdisciplinary scholarship on the rights of non-humans and inhuman worlds, including animals, nature, AI and divinities, to question whether humanity is still central to our understanding of the world. It includes a critical cultural geography research stream on ‘Inhuman Legacies and Racial Architectures of the Anthropocene’.