The Department of Geography Colloquium Series presents Dr. Derek H. Alderman on “Civil Rights as Geospatial Work: The African American Freedom Struggle as Counter-mapping and Radical Place-Making” on Friday, Nov. 3, at 3:05 p.m. in Clippinger 119.
Dr. Derek Alderman
Alderman is Professor of Geography at the University of Tennessee and President of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). His research and teaching specialties include race, public memory, heritage tourism, critical place name study, and the African-American experience—including slavery, the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, and more contemporary social and spatial justice campaigns.
He is the author of over 110 articles, book chapters, and other essays along with the award-winning book (with Owen Dwyer), Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory. Alderman is part of a multi-university team completing a study of the politics of remembering slavery at southern plantation museums and identifying places for making interventions in the historical neglect of enslaved identities and struggles. He is also engaged in a project (with Josh Inwood) that explores the role of resistant geospatial intelligence and counter-mapping within SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), one of the important organizations of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. The National Science Foundation has funded both projects. Alderman is a strong advocate of a greater incorporation of civil rights, social justice, and critical race study within geographic education. He is the recent recipient of the Distinguished Mentor Award from the National Council for Geographic Education and the Distinguished Career Award from the Ethnic Geography Specialty Group of the AAG. As President of the AAG, Alderman is developing the “Geography is REAL (Responsive, Engaged, Advocating, and Life-Improving)” initiative, which encourages and supports greater public intellectualism, communication savviness, and disciplinary promotion. Alderman can be followed on Twitter @MLKStreet.
Abstract: Civil rights struggles, whether spectacular moments of formal protest or the daily acts of defiance, often involve the strategic planning and mobilization of resources, bodies, and information. In other words, African American resistance was and is a matter of work, the product and process of physical, emotional, and social labor. As part of recognizing the materiality and spatiality of this resistance, I argue for an examination of the struggle for civil rights as “geospatial work.” As part of the fight against white supremacy, legitimacy, African Americans have long participated in (counter) mapping, collecting and analyzing geographical data and intelligence, spatial planning, and various forms of radical place (re)making. I offer a series of vignettes that demonstrate the different kinds of geospatial work that African Americans have engaged in as they have sought to take control of their own lives and spaces in the face of rampant racism. These vignettes cross a range of historical periods, case studies, and political contexts—from efforts to escape slavery to the navigation of Jim Crow segregation to famous and less well known campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement and finally to more contemporary place claiming struggles. I conclude by calling for the help of professional geographers and other spatial scientists, asking that we consider ways to make civil rights more central to geographic research, teaching, and outreach.
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