Panel Title: Stories at the Center: The Role of Storytelling in the New Radical Geographical Imagination

Panel Abstract: In recent years, urban geographers, planners, and policy makers have begun to consider the role that storytelling should play in the design of socially just, sustainable urban environments. This panel heeds the call of critical geographers, such as Robert Beauregard, Katherine McKittrick, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Clyde Woods, who urge us to seek out the way in which the stories of those most marginalized by global economic structures demand from us a new, interdisciplinary understanding of space and place. It also seeks to address questions about the importance of storytelling to the formation of a new radical geographical imagination capable of resisting and thinking beyond the spatial dictates of Neoliberal global capitalism.

Some questions this panel might consider are: How might stories and storytelling be useful in our work to make sense of dominant geographic structures of knowledge and break open our understanding of what urban space can be and do? How does the practice of telling, listening to, and writing stories about where we live “change the problem space” (Scott) for residents, planners, policy makers, and urban intellectuals thinking about the problem of achieving a socially just city? How do Black geographies and Black geographical stories in particular express, portray, or come to terms with the city spaces in a way that is not accomplished by dominant geographies as they are dictated by canonical social science, architectural, and planning texts (McKittrick and Woods)? Historically, how have marginalized counter stories about the “cities of fact and feeling” (Rotella) worked to push up against or require change in the ways in which powerful urban actors (politicians, planners, intellectuals/academics) build and imagine cities? Finally, how does the process of telling and writing stories forge paths for readers and writers, audiences and artists, between revolutionary theory and revolutionary praxis?

Please submit 250-300 word abstracts and a brief CV to michnac@bc.edu by no later than January 8 if you are interested in participating.