Allyship and Antiracism Work

September 17, 2020

Allyship and Antiracism Work

As a college and institution of higher learning, it is our mission to promote intellectual inquiry and effective civic engagement within the context of respect for diversity. Our ability to educate is one tool for making change in the world. We can demand change in our community, but first, we have to educate our community on why that change is necessary.

One way we can educate our community is through the College Conversations: Allyship & Antiracism series, which features faculty members in the college whose research focuses on identifying racism, how to become an antiracist, and other topics related to allyship and antiracism.

Derek Alderman, professor and interim head of the UT geography department, presented Embattled Names, Racialized Memories, and Wounded Places, with colleague Gregg Ferguson, a community activist and educator, July 30.

As of late, we have seen growing calls from activists and communities to remove the names of racist historical figures from the names of streets, parks, schools, university campus buildings, and other spaces. Often lost on many members of the public, especially opponents to these changes, is the larger historical relationship between these valorized names and the physical, structural, and symbolic violence of white supremacy—realized both in the past and the present.

To put these ongoing struggles in context, Alderman discussed the power of commemorative place names and the complex role they play in the memory-work of antiracism and the politics of planning more socially just landscapes. Ferguson described her own efforts to rename a Stonewall Jackson Middle School and the results of her dissertation, which documented the harmful, wounding effects of white supremacist and Confederate names on students and teachers of color.

Watch the presentation online.

The College Conversations series is open to the public, but registration is required. Learn more about how to register and see a list of upcoming presentations.

Applying a Unique Perspective

September 17, 2020

Applying a Unique Perspective

LaToya E. Eaves is an assistant professor of geography, joining the faculty in August 2020. Prior to arriving at UT, Eaves worked at Middle Tennessee State University, where she served as assistant professor and founding faculty member in the Department of Global Studies & Human Geography. Eaves earned her PhD from Florida International University in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, with a major field in geography. 

Eaves’s service to the discipline of geography is far reaching. She was recently elected a national councilor and serves as treasurer of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Additionally, she serves on the Harassment-Free AAG Task Force, which has been responsible for some groundbreaking policies and protections in our field. Further, Eaves is the lead co-founder of the Black Geographies Specialty Group (BGSG) of the AAG. She served as the inaugural chair from 2017-2020 and co-chaired the 2018 Black Geographies conference theme at the 2018 AAG New Orleans meeting. In recognition of her service to the discipline, Eaves received two of the AAG’s most coveted awards: the 2019 Ronald F. Abler Distinguished Service Honors and the 2019 AAG Enhancing Diversity Award. 

In her research, Eaves develops and applies a uniquely geographic perspective to the study of race, gender, and sexuality—all with an un-flinching commitment to social and spatial justice and establishing collaborative relationships between researchers and communities. Eaves’s work has appeared in the Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Dialogues in Human Geography, Geoforum, Gender, Place & Culture, and Southeastern Geographer.

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Eaves in Senegal

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Eaves at Antipode Radical Geography Workshop in Mexico City

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Eaves was recently awarded a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), for which she serves as PI, to study the role of African American history museums as part of a critical race perspective on civic engagement and heritage tourism in the United States. 

The grant is a collaboration across five universities, including East Tennessee State University, Eastern Michigan University, Georgia Southern University, and Texas Tech University. The funds will be used for a multi-sited project, analyzing the role of race, heritage, memory, tourism, and community and civic engagement through African American history museums at four geographic sites across the United States. The project will provide a lens into understanding the extent to which museums serve the public through documenting, preserving, and interpreting Black culture and history and difficult events alongside and in partnership with their communities. Additionally, the project will seek to understand the role of African American history museums within their communities, cities, and the larger museum landscape, and how museum professionals address controversial current events as part of their missions to support communities at the local, regional, and national scales. The research is part of Tourism RESET, an initiative that seeks greater social responsibility in the representation of African American heritage in tourism.

Movement in Black Geographies

September 17, 2020

Movement in Black Geographies

In August, co-project investigators, Derek Alderman and Joshua Kenna were notified they had received a $191,236 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to host a three-week summer teacher institute in 2021 titled “Geographic Mobility in the African American Freedom Struggle.”

The proposed institute is a joint effort between Alderman, professor in the UT Department of Geography, and Kenna, associate professor in the UT Department of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education, with support from the Tennessee Geographic Alliance and Ethan Bottone (’20). The institute will provide 25 K-12 educators from across the US with an opportunity to participate in the NEH special initiative “A More Perfect Union” by exploring the history of the Civil Rights movement through geographic mobility—given that unfettered geographic mobility is a core democratic principle at the heart of the African American freedom struggle.

The goal of the planned institute is to contribute to the intellectual growth of participating educators and prepare them to create and disseminate important synergies between the teaching of history and the teaching of geography—two subjects increasingly joined together in the educational standards of many states. The institute offers a model of critical thought, instruction, and pedagogical application that supports ongoing calls for greater numbers of social studies educators, especially those in a still white-dominated field of geography, to address power and inequity.

The planned institute is also of specific importance to the wider community of geography, as the discipline centers the lives, contributions, and struggles of people of color within its teaching, research, and public outreach.

“Our project promises to bring together new critical scholarship in Black geographies to practicing teachers, which will in turn help their students learn how geographic mobility has long been central to the fight for African American civil rights and self-determination,” Alderman said. “While such a pedagogical approach is long overdue, it is urgently needed now as the nation reckons with the unjust way that the movements of Black communities continue to be policed and controlled.”

The institute’s foundational theme of geographic mobility, while informed by the traditional importance geographers place on spatial interaction, draws heavily from the more recent interdisciplinary “mobility turn.” This newer approach to mobility recognizes that the dynamics of where, when, and how we move is a product of social relations, the exercise of power, and cultural identity. Many types of movement will be addressed by the institute in the context of Black experiences in the US. These movements include private and public transportation across everyday spaces, migration and relocation into and out of regions, and touristic navigation and wayfinding through (un)welcoming communities and places.

The institute seeks to create a space for critical inquiry and collegial interaction that can help participants bring together and apply these two relatively recent intellectual approaches—the “mobility turn” and “Black geographies.” These analytical frameworks, while of growing currency within the humanities and social sciences, have thus far not had a significant place in pedagogical research or curriculum development. Using guest lectures, directed readings, hands-on learning, field trips, and teaching material development, institute organizers will demonstrate the way the right of mobility was shaped by, and in turn shaped, American systems of racism and anti-racist resistance.

This will be the first NEH-funded teacher institute hosted by the department since 2007. In 2002, 2004, and 2007, Charles Aikens, professor emeritus, and Tennessee Geographic Alliance Coordinator, Kurt Butefish, served as co-PIs on three successful four-week institutes focusing on the geography of the American South.

“This is a huge deal for me to have the opportunity to contribute to this project as I approach the end of my career,” Butefish said. “My work with previous institutes has provided some of the most memorable and rewarding highlights of my time at UT. Getting to work with the best of the best scholars in geography and related fields is so inspiring. And, I made lifelong friends with some of the many wonderful teachers from across the US who participated in those earlier institutes. I’m excited at the prospect of forging new friendships amongst this year’s cohort.”