Topographies of Hope
Cindi Katz
Professor of Geography, Women’s and Gender Studies, and American Studies
Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Abstract:
Practicing hope keeps the possibility of change alive—a methodology against fear in dismal times. And while the dismal touches all too many places in multiple registers these days, countertopography is a way of marking the common effects of, and responses to, large-scale processes in disparate locations. Drawing out the common grounds and entanglements of such shifts as global economic restructuring, deskilling, state violence, or dispossession as they play out in distinct and dissimilar places offers a new geographical imagination for political organizing and action. Its ‘contour lines’ intended to incite new political imaginaries and spur alternative geographies of action and activism, potential spaces of hope in an expanded field. In this talk I will look at some of the experiences, practices, and challenges of grassroots organizations negotiating complicated place-based struggles while simultaneously engaging their translocal aspirations as critical to understand in building social movements at once global and intimate, sustainable and targeted, grounded and boundary crossing. Their actions create contour lines for practice and trace topographies of hope at different times and places making the imagined possible despite the dangers and displacements associated with the mobilities of capital accumulation, racialized state violence, and neoliberal land grabs.
Speaker Bio:
Cindi KatzÌýis Professor of Geography, Women’s and Gender Studies, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.ÌýHer research concerns social reproduction, the production of nature, the workings of the security state in everyday environments, the privatization of the public environment, the cultural politics of childhood, and the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination.ÌýShe has published widely on these themes as well as on social theory and the politics of knowledge.ÌýShe is the author of Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday LivesÌý(2004) which won the American Association of Geographers Meridian Book Award for the Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. She is the editor (with Janice Monk) of Full Circles: Geographies of Gender over the LifeÌýCourse (1993), Life’s Work: Geographies of Social ReproductionÌý(with Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell) (2004), andÌýThe People, Place, and Space Reader (with Jen Jack Gieseking, William Mangold, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert) (2014). The 2024 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Honor and the 2021 recipient of Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the AAG, Katz held a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2003-4), and the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in Gender Studies at Cambridge University (2011-12). SheÌýis working on two book projects: Childhood as Spectacle and a collection of her writings on social reproduction tentatively titled Vagabond Capitalism: Social Reproduction in Crisis.
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