More Reflections on a White Discipline

Abstract

Recently, the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Climate Action Task Force set forth to imagine academic knowledge production and sharing beyond the current conference model to address the ecological impacts of large-scale, conventional, in-person conferences. Building on provocations of Pulido’s (2002) paper “Reflections on a White Discipline,” this article seeks to ensure that racial justice is part of that imagining. There is much to be ecologically gained by moving toward smaller regional gatherings and large virtual conferences. Our task, however, is to assess the loss of mentorship, affirmation, and community found at the AAG Annual Meeting that sustains Black, Indigenous, and people of color geographers in the current climate of our discipline. We deploy the term climate for two reasons. First, climate refers to “toxic environments” of home institutions within which geographers of color often teach, research, and write (Mahtani 2014). We call on all geographers to contend with the epistemological, institutional, and individual actions needed to detoxify spaces and places of geography. Second, in pace with Pulido (2002), we argue that knowledge production on the climate crisis is enhanced when geography becomes a safer place for geographers of color. Action taken toward climate justice cannot happen without actions to achieve racial justice.

最近, 美国地理学家协会（AAG）气候行动工作组开始考虑在目前的会议模式之外, 设想学术知识的创造和分享, 从而解决大规模的、常规的、面对面的会议对生态的影响。在普利多（2002）的论文“反思白人学科”的基础上, 本文试图确保这一设想能涵盖种族正义。向小型区域性聚会和大型虚拟会议发展, 在生态方面可以获得很多好处。然而, AAG年会还具备指导、认可和社群等功能, 本文的任务是评估在这方面上的损失。在目前的学科氛围中, AAG年会支持黑人、土著和有色人种地理学者。我们使用“气候”这个词有两个原因。首先, 气候指的是本机构的“有毒环境”, 有色人种地理学者经常在这种环境中进行教学、研究和写作（Mahtani 2014）。我们呼吁所有地理学家采取认识论的、体制的和个人的抗争行动, 对地理学科的空间和地点进行消毒。第二, 与Pulido（2002）的观点一致, 我们认为, 对于有色人种地理学者来说, 当地理学科成为更安全的领域时, 能加强气候危机的知识创造。没有实现种族正义的行动, 就不可能有实现气候正义的行动。

La Fuerza de Tarea de Acción Climática de la Asociación Americana de Geógrafos (AAG) recientemente se comprometió en la gestión de imaginar la producción y difusión de conocimiento académico más allá del actual modelo de conferencia, para abocar los impactos ecológicos de las conferencias convencionales presenciales y masivas. Elaborando a partir de las instigaciones del trabajo de Pulido (2002), “Reflexiones sobre una disciplina blanca”, este artículo busca garantizar que la justicia racial sea parte de tal figuración. Mucho es lo que ecológicamente se puede ganar con cambiar hacia reuniones regionales más pequeñas y conferencias virtuales grandes. Nuestra tarea, sin embargo, es evaluar la pérdida de tutoría, afirmación y sentido de comunidad que se encuentran en la Reunión Anual de la AAG, que sostiene a geógrafos negros, indígenas y gente de color en el clima actual de nuestra disciplina. Nosotras desplegamos el término clima por dos razones. Primero, clima hace referencia a los “entornos tóxicos” de las instituciones domésticas dentro de las cuales los geógrafos de color a menudo enseñan, investigan y escriben (Mahtani 2014). Hacemos un llamado a todos los geógrafos a luchar con las acciones epistemológicas, institucionales e individuales que sean necesarias para detoxificar los espacios y lugares de la geografía. Segundo, haciendo eco de Pulido (2002), argüimos que la producción de conocimiento sobre la crisis del clima se fortalece cuando la geografía se convierta en un lugar más seguro para los geógrafos de color. La acción que se tome hacia una justicia climática no puede darse sin las acciones que lleven a lograr la justicia racial.

Key Words:

• Black geographies
• climate
• climate justice
• Latinx geographies
• racial justice

关键词:

• 黑人地区
• 气候
• 气候正义
• 拉丁美洲地区
• 种族正义。

Palabras clave:

• clima
• geografías latinax
• geografías negras
• justicia climática
• justicia racial

I want you to attend the American Association of Geographers annual conference. It is a big conference, and the majority of it will not be entirely relevant to you, but I think when you find your people, you will feel at home.

—Laura Pulido to Cristina Faiver-Serna in 2016

In recent years through the work of women of color geographers, American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meetings have held spaces rarely encountered within the context of North American geography: Geographers of color, who often experience isolation, microaggressions, and gatekeeping within home institutions, gathered for panels, plenaries, and specialty group meetings on Black and Latinx geographies. The sense of community, solidarity, and awe of watching such spaces—sacred spaces (Eaves 2020)—form within the AAG was palpable. We found “our people.” As Chicana and Black women geographers in the United States, finding spaces in geography that welcome what we embody, as well as the nondominant and critical epistemologies from which we draw and produce knowledge, is difficult. Yet, in recent years, the AAG Annual Meeting has in some ways provided a space where marginalized geographers can convene, meet mentors, build an intellectual community, and receive validation that our work is, in fact, not only geographic but resides within the discipline of geography, with potential to transform it (Faiver-Serna 2019; Eaves 2020). Yet, the glimpse of possibility and respite that these spaces have recently provided are finite.

Recently, the AAG Climate Action Task Force set forth to imagine academic knowledge production and sharing beyond the current conference model to address the ecological impacts of large-scale, conventional, in-person conferences. This article seeks to ensure that racial justice is part of that imagining. We attend to this in three ways. First, we call for disciplinary leaders, gatekeepers, and actors to do the work of creating an atmosphere where geographers of color feel safe and their contributions are seen and validated. Second, and relatedly, we argue that white supremacy as foundational to disciplinary epistemological traditions continues to stifle the possibilities of climate justice research and, thus, critical, intersectional knowledge production on the climate crisis. These two articulations build squarely on the provocations of Pulido’s (2002) article “Reflections on a White Discipline,” in which she argued, “the overwhelmingly white composition of the discipline has very real implications for both individual experiences and our intellectual production and disciplinary culture” (42).

We move beyond Pulido (2002), however, by foregrounding sacred spaces that are forged within a broader atmosphere of hostility toward marginalized geographers and geographies, as the means by which epistemic white supremacy foundational to geography can be ruptured. These include spaces by and for Black and Latinx geographies at the AAG Annual Meeting in recent years but also research collectives as well. Faria et al. (2019) highlighted research collectives as spaces within the broader discipline of geography where on-the-ground work of racial justice is taking place through recruitment and collaborative work. This is, in fact, where our academic genealogy begins and informs the intellectual genealogy of this article. In 2017, we came together as students of Laura Pulido in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon and began working on collaborative environmental racism research together. Through this work we envisioned the kind of collaborative lab space that our advisor could grow within the department. The following year, as Pulido welcomed new undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow, the Critical Race Lab was born.

Legacies of colonial and racial projects have produced diverse but relational global geographies (Lowe 2015). Experiences of marginalization and subjugation in “overt, invisible and insidious forms” of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity, structural and systemic racism, and relational racialization take myriad forms (Christian 2019). In what follows we speak from a North American, United States context as Black and Chicana geographers. We capture some of the ways in which epistemic white supremacy has persisted within North American disciplinary norms and how it shapes geographic climate knowledge and climate injustice. We also observe the labor of geographers of color to create safe spaces at the AAG Annual Meetings and even within home institutions through research collectives. We examine these efforts through the lens of Sharpe’s theorization of the weather and microclimates. Sharpe observed that for Black people, the climate is hostile, the weather is often dangerous, and to survive and thrive, microclimates of safety and sanctuary must be built (Sharpe and Hergon 2017). Here, we extend this analysis into a broader experience of geographers of color within a historically and still predominantly white discipline.

The Climate of Geography

Building on Pulido’s (2002) analysis, we observe two scales of impact of the heavy white lean of geography that still ring true today. First, there are the institutional spaces in which geographers of color work, write, and teach. Women of color geographers have long used experiential theorization and intersectional feminist frameworks to examine the ways in which geography’s whiteness creates a climate that is inhospitable to geographers of color through institutional and intellectual cultures that exclude and marginalize them (see Mahtani 2002, 2004, 2006, 2014; Pulido 2002; Liu 2006; Hawthorne and Heitz 2018; Faiver-Serna 2019; Ybarra 2019; Eaves 2020). Second, as Pulido argued, the intellectual production of the discipline is inhibited by its whiteness. In particular, the historical and pervasive whiteness of the discipline has led to deep neglect of serious intellectual engagements with race and the environment within the discipline of geography.

In the last two decades, various studies have brought to light geography’s rather abysmal numbers when it comes to the representation of people of color. In fact, Faria et al. (2019) found that geography, in particular, has consistently had very low numbers of Black and Latinx students and faculty across U.S. institutions, numbers that persist even today as other fields have made progress. Black and Latinx undergraduate and graduate student enrollment stagnated at about 7 percent for geography between 2005 and 2015, yet these numbers had risen to 31 and 21 percent, respectively, across degree-granting institutions (Faria et al. 2019). Furthermore, the percentage of Black and Latinx faculty in geography stayed at 4 to 5, even as the value has doubled across higher education faculty (Faria et al. 2019). These figures stress that geography is still a heavily white discipline, which shapes the scholarship produced and the experiences of scholars of color in the discipline (Faria et al. 2019; Oswin 2020).

The climate of geography still weighs on geographers of color. When uprisings across the United States during the summer of 2020 sparked a reckoning in geography, among other academic disciplines, many geographers of color took to Twitter to let it be known that messages of solidarity from institutions and departments were, frankly, out of touch with the ways these same institutions have historically treated us (Hamilton 2020a, 2020b). Geographers of color face microaggressions, gatekeeping, silencing, and marginalizing in a variety of spaces in geography (Liu 2006; Mahtani 2006). Mahtani (2014) referred to these as “toxic geographies,” stating, “there remains a disconnection between the growing body of scholarship on race and colonialism in social and cultural geography contrasted against the ongoing subordination and marginalization of scholars of colour within geography departments. This gap produces exclusionary and toxic environments” (360). If we consider the broader hostile climate that geographers of color confront in our everyday lives, the AAG Annual Meeting contains within and despite of it what Sharpe (2017) called “microclimates”: life-giving spaces amid larger toxic geographies where we find inspiration, comfort, and a sense of community.

Racial Justice and Knowledge Production on the Climate Crisis

It is important to note that Black, Indigenous, and other geographers of color are not simply arguing for greater representation. Representation is certainly an aim. Yet, our presence in geography, alone, does not itself rupture disciplinary epistemological foundations in white supremacy or fundamentally shift a hostile climate in disciplinary spaces. Rather, the question is this: How does geography listen, value, and incorporate what we, other geographers, have to contribute to geographical and climate knowledge production? As the AAG Climate Action Task Force begins to reimagine modes of connecting and sharing geographical climate knowledge within an era shaped by the climate crisis, we also need to reimagine the kinds of geographical knowledge production needed and the means to produce it. We want to underscore the point Pulido (2002) made nineteen years ago: The overwhelmingly white composition and exclusionary culture of the discipline of geography stifle the knowledge we produce. This encompasses geographical methods and analyses for understanding and addressing our current climate crisis and working toward climate justice.

Scholars have argued that the climate crisis we find ourselves in is founded on systems and structures rooted in white supremacy, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism (Vergès 2017; Pulido 2018; Saldanha 2020). It must be acknowledged that settler colonialism continues to be sanctioned by law and, important for our discussion, validated by disciplinary scholarship, geography included (Oswin 2020). We must be critical of the role that geography continues to play in maintaining the present-day legacies of colonialism and slavery, especially as it relates to climate injustice and whose knowledges are valued as valid climate solutions. Scholarship that seeks to understand the climate crisis and actions that seek to remediate it must recognize and address its white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist roots. Therefore, the climate crisis necessitates serious institutional and epistemological engagements with racial justice.

Geographic study is indispensable to understanding and addressing the climate crisis. Several studies, however, have indicated that climate knowledge production has several shortcomings, particularly when it comes to incorporating subaltern ways of knowing and living in the world during this climate crisis. On one hand, there is an overall North–South divide, where we see climate change knowledge production coming primarily out of institutions in the Global North (Pasgaard et al. 2015; Blicharska et al. 2017; Skelton et al. 2018), even though those who will experience the brunt of lethal climate change impacts are in the Global South (Pulido 2018; Sen Roy 2018). Importantly, various scholars have highlighted how race has been undertheorized within literature on the present human-induced climate crisis (Vergès 2017; Pulido 2018; Yusoff 2018; Davis et al. 2019; Saldanha 2020). Within the United States, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) bear most of the burden of climate change impacts (Martinich et al. 2013; Marino 2015, 2018; Baldwin and Erickson 2020; Gonzalez 2020), yet, environmental and climate justice scholars and activists have long stressed the dismissal of Indigenous, local, and embodied knowledges in climate and environmental research (Corburn 2005; Hulme and Mahony 2010; Whyte 2018). Thus, we see an extension of a long history in geography of non-white populations as the object of study, but not understood, accepted, or validated as knowledge producers (Sibley 1995; Woods 1998, 2017; McKittrick 2006; Oswin 2020).

Regardless of what has been happening in the academy, BIPOC climate justice activists and scholars have long possessed climate knowledge and sustainable governance plans rooted in subaltern and Indigenous epistemologies. In fact, Whyte (2018) pointed out that whereas settlers fear a dystopic climate future, Indigenous populations have been living in their ancestors’ dystopia and producing adaptation plans to maintain traditions long threatened by white supremacist, capitalist activities of extraction, accumulation, and genocide. Attempts to incorporate Indigenous climate knowledge have been met with inadequate statements of “recognition,” but little serious engagement or implementation (Ford et al. 2016; Whyte 2017; Birch 2018). Black geographies scholars have highlighted that subaltern populations have always produced environmental and spatial knowledge based on lived experiences and knowledge passed down through generations (Woods 1998, 2017; McKittrick 2006, 2011). Nonetheless, Woods (2007) suggested that this knowledge has been framed as emotionally driven and incapable of producing a global ethic and forward-looking theories and forms of governance. McKittrick (2006) asserted, “nonwhite women, men, and children are excluded from canonical geographic investigations and/or limited to objects of study (oddities in the seamless white landscape), rather than relevant geographic subjects (producing, critiquing, and writing human geographies)” (11, italics in original).

As many BIPOC in geography have attested, our presence, without critical institutional commitments to racial justice beyond hollow statements of solidarity, leaves intact toxic geographies where we face microaggressions, silencing, sidelining, and epistemic violence (Mahtani 2014; Hawthorne and Heitz 2018). Our material, political, and intellectual selves are one and inextricably the same. Despite feminist geography’s interventions to foreground positionality, disciplinary norms continue to ask of us to compartmentalize ourselves, our experiences, and our knowledge traditions for the sake of a faux “objectivity” that is foundational to disciplinarity. “Other” ways of knowing—queer and trans spatialities, women of color feminist methodologies, Indigenous onto-epistemologies, a Black sense of place, and other “indigenous ways of knowing”—have shown us over and over again that not only can “othered” peoples produce knowledge, but we do so through ways of being and knowing beyond the confinements of what Western epistemologies delineate and demand (Spivak 1988; McKittrick 2006; Woods 2007, 2017; Sharpe 2016; Daigle and Ramírez 2019; Oswin 2020). Geography, a discipline deeply committed to Western epistemologies, needs to undo this of itself to produce climate knowledge critical to solving our climate crisis and in turn make an unwavering commitment to racial justice.

Microclimates of Survival

The emergence of Black and Latinx Geographies Specialty Groups (BGSG and LxGSG) in the last few years has changed the landscape of the AAG Annual Meeting. It has spurred closer ties and coalition building with the Queer and Trans Geographies and Indigenous Peoples Specialty Groups, spurred new calls for papers and jobs, and attracted new scholars to the discipline. The work of BGSG and LxGSG is creating and demanding changes in the broader discipline of geography (Hamilton 2020c). This work stands on the shoulders of feminist geographers and is done in conjunction and in solidarity with the work that geographers are doing within their own departments and home institutions, such as working to establish research collectives and labs devoted to the critical geographical study of power in the hierarchization of race, gender, sexuality, and ability in society. These sacred spaces are forged within a broader atmosphere of hostility toward marginalized geographers and geographies, and we recognize the efforts made to build microclimates of survival.

Drawing on Sharpe’s (2016) theorization of the climate, both physically and metaphorically, as anti-Black, we recognize the relationality between a climate of anti-Blackness, and a climate of anti-otherness in geography. In other words, the social and structural processes of race, racism, and racialization work to maintain the hegemony of white supremacy. As Black feminists have long pointed out, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia intersect with racism to produce interlocking forms of oppression and hostile spaces (Crenshaw 1990; Omi and Winant [1984] 2014). With the establishment of the BGSG in 2017 and the LxGSG in 2018, geographers committed to an “other geography” have been able to create “sites of belonging” (Oswin 2020) and “sacred spaces” where we can “be—without explanation—without becoming small, without fear” (Eaves 2020) to produce and share knowledge explicitly committed to “a radical, decolonial, anti-racist, and coalitional politics” (Faiver-Serna 2019). Despite this, coalitional antiracist geographies have faced institutional barriers within the AAG itself. In 2017 the only Latinx geographies panel discussion was scheduled at the same time as a Black geographies panel discussion, despite the fact that “there would be no Latinx geographies without Black Geographies” (Cahuas 2019; Faiver-Serna 2019). This example demonstrates the barriers marginalized geographers face in developing coalitional knowledge-sharing practices while working within a dominant Western white supremacist paradigm.

Drawing again on Sharpe (2017), we understand coalitional place-making practices of “other” geographers and geographies at the AAG to be “acts of practice that can disrupt the weather” (52) or the palpable social, political, and epistemological conditions of suppression, oppression, and violence that geographers of color experience. It is only through a disciplinary and organizational commitment to support and foster “indigenous ways of knowing” (Woods 2007) toward a geography actively committed to dismantling its own overt and subversive commitments to white supremacy, will geographic knowledge on the climate begin to attend to the imperative of racial injustice in the climate crisis, and “other” ways of knowing will not only be welcomed, but actively supported and expanded on through our disciplinary means of knowledge production and sharing.

The whiteness of geography, in both representation and epistemological values, not only produces harsh intellectual climates for “other” geographers, it also perpetuates the neglect of critically necessary engagements with race and racial justice within scholarship on the climate crisis. Moving forward in our imagining of new, ecologically responsible modes of knowledge production and sharing, geography must make commitments to racial justice on several scales: in citational practices and critical pedagogies within and beyond classrooms, within departmental cultures and practices, within universities and, yes, even in our professional organizations.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our advisor, Laura Pulido, for her endless encouragement and for critical feedback on early drafts of this article. We also thank the University of Oregon Critical Race Lab, Patricia Martin, and our generous reviewers, all of whose comments and suggestions helped to strengthen our arguments. We alone remain responsible for all shortcomings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tianna Bruno

TIANNA BRUNO is a Doctoral Candidate in the Geography Department at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include Black geographies, critical environmental justice, political ecology, and critical physical geography.

Cristina Faiver-Serna

CRISTINA FAIVER-SERNA is a Doctoral Candidate in the Geography Department at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include critical race theory, Chicana and Latina feminist theory, feminist science studies, critical environmental justice, and Latinx geographies.