Insurgent Geophysics, Black Gravities

Insurgent Geophysics, Black Gravities, with J.T. Roane, Tina Campt and Kathryn Yusoff

In geophysical terms, gravity is a force or pressure acting on a body to bring it back down to earth, but why is it that racialized bodies seem to meet the earth more quickly, often with pressure, violence and grit? In the grind of this racial geophysics, we might detect both resistant counter forces and subterranean tactics, other geophysics of being. 

Join us for this roundtable featuring Tina Campt, JT Roane and Kathryn Yusoff – who will share their collective work converging on ideas of gravity and environment in racialized worlds. Together we seek to understand how different sensual, geophysical and aesthetic occupations of gravity can change anti-black geophysics.

Date: Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2021

Time: 11 a.m., Phoenix; 1 p.m., Province; 6 p.m., London.

Register in advance for this webinar:

https://asu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2fLmcbPCQiW1C0mARiiOQQ

About the Speakers:

Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. One of the founding researchers in Black European Studies, her early work theorized gender, racial and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe, focusing on the role of vernacular photography in processes of historical interpretation. She is the author of three books: "Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race", "Gender and Memory in the Third Reich" (University Michigan Press, 2004), "Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe" (Duke University Press, 2012) and "Listening to Images"(Duke University Press, 2017). Her forthcoming book, "A Black Gaze", will be published by MIT Press in fall 2021. She has held faculty positions at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Duke University and Barnard College. She currently serves as a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. At the Cogut Institute, she leads the Black Visualities Initiative.

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography in the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research examines materialities of the inhuman in the context of environmental change, race and subjectivity. Most recently, she is author of "A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None" (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), a SI on "Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene" in "Theory Culture and Society", 'Epochal Aesthetics', 'The Mine as Paradigm', 'White Utopia/Black Inferno' in E-flux, and 'The Inhumanities' in "The Annals of American Geographers". Her forthcoming book, "Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race" addresses the histories of geology and the gravities of race. For more of Kathryn’s work, visit: https://tinyurl.com/3844ky34