April 20 – Brandi Thompson Summers – Spatial Temporalities: The Future-Pasts of Black Dispossession

In this talk, Dr. Summers explores the history of unhoused populations in Oakland, the cyclical displacements of Black locals, and the appearance and reappearance of parking lots in these stories of disruption. She tells the story of West Oakland, in particular, as a testing ground for speculative urbanism–an urbanism based not in speculator’s profit or the spectacles of a city’s self-branding, but in the utopian and dystopian possibilities that unfold in an ongoing (implicitly and explicitly racialized) housing emergency.

Brandi T. Summers, PhD is assistant professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and is founding co-director of the Berkeley Lab for Speculative Urbanisms. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. Her book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how competing notions of blackness organize efforts to structure economic relations and develop land in gentrifying Washington DC. Her current book project explores the roots and routes of Black resistance that laid a foundation for the current affective economies organized to reclaim space through public cultures, politics, and the aesthetics of Black life in her hometown, Oakland, California. Dr. Summers has published several articles and essays that analyze the relationship between race, power, aesthetics, and urbanization that appear in both scholarly and popular publications, including New York Times, The Boston, Globe, Places Journal, and Antipode.

Date | Time
April 20, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 20th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2022 series, please fill out this form.

Posted in Colloquium, Cultural Studies Events.