Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference, March 17-18, 2023

January 13, 2023

The Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference promotes critical dialogue on the racial, ecological, sociopolitical, cultural, economic, and sociospatial processes that constitute the materialities of Black life and its everyday contours. The BGGSC foregrounds the geographical practices, knowledge, and interventions of African Diasporic communities while challenging, reorienting, and refuting racialized colonial conceptions of space, place, time, scale, diffusion, and landscapes. This collective gathering is designed for graduate students and advanced undergraduates to collaborate and engage with each other through Black geographical thought across disciplines, academic affiliations, and communities.

The BGGSC will take place on March 17-18, 2023 at the University of California, Berkeley. The two-day conference will feature panels, a roundtable discussion on the geographical imprints of Black horror films, and a keynote lecture from Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis. We welcome submissions from graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and community members, including research papers, creative and digital projects, potential articles, dissertation chapters, and multimedia works centering four designated themes: Black Earth, Black Sound, Black California, and Black Futures. Please see the attached PDF for the CFPs. The core themes anchoring this conference are designed to offer robust discussion to a receptive, interdisciplinary audience of scholars and are not meant to encompass the totality of Black geographical inquiry. If you are interested in participating, please submit a project synopsis or abstract (max 300 words) via this Google Form by Monday, January 23, 2023 at 11:59 pm Pacific time. For more information about BGGSC, please visit our website or send questions to contact@bggsc.com and we will respond as soon as we can.

The Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference is organized by graduate students from Berkeley Black Geographies, the Geography and History departments at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University’s History Department and Black Studies Collective (a research workshop sponsored by the program in African & African American Studies).