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 Katz is Professor of Geography, Women’s and Gender Studies, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her 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. She has published widely on these themes as well as on social theory and the politics of knowledge. She is the author of Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives (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 Life Course (1993), Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction (with Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell) (2004), and The 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). She is 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.

Want to know more about the bond between people and place?

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Dr. Robin Roth 
Professor of Geography 
University of Guelph 

Abstract: 

The Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership is a Canada-wide network of Indigenous thought leaders, scholars, conservation organizations, Indigenous governments, and conservation practitioners united in their commitment to supporting the establishment of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas and the transformation of existing protected areas. This presentation will discuss the work of the partnership as applied political ecology. I will discuss how key tenants of political ecology - 1) power is relational and multi-scalar, 2) the social and natural are co-constituted, 3) accepted categories of modernity need to be destabilized, and 4) transformational change is needed- are activated in the work of the partnership and, by extension, the work of decolonizing conservation. 

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Dr. Aída Guhlincozzi 
Assistant Professor of Geography 
University of Missouri 

Abstract: 

This presentation covers the recent work in health geography focused on vulnerable populations by Dr. Aída Guhlincozzi and colleagues. Specifically, this will cover the ongoing movement of the field in a direction of better encapsulating the needs of communities and populations previously overlooked and underserved by U.S. healthcare systems. This talk includes recently published results on Latina women’s healthcare access, discussions of race and ethnicity in the Latine community, and critical disability geography work regarding Autism and healthcare access. A key intervention recommended includes a brief discussion of the value of community geographic theoretical frameworks and methods.

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