Pursuing Geography and Making Worlds →

This is a tremendous interview, and, somehow, the first time I’ve become aware of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work. Geography began to fascinate me over ten years ago as we drove through the uninhabited Zambian countryside with Harding in Zambia, only to come across a small village in what seemed to me like the middle of nowhere. This excerpt on the why of geography reframes a question I’ve been trying to engage for the last decade:

Studying geography and studying therefore, as I like to put it, not “where” is Nebraska, but “why” is Nebraska? We have the same series of questions and problems and excitement, which is that in organizing ourselves with one another, with external materials and the environment, humans make places. And they make them and enhance them and destroy them. And those places have relations to other places; some are antagonistic, some are different. And there are the various forces that we’re trying so hard to come to terms with today. Such as the forces of global capitalism, the forces of racial capitalism, the forces of patriarchy, and so forth, all have a spatial expression — or I should say really a series of spatial expressions that we should, must be mindful of if we want to change that.

All of these “-isms” are located in time and space which makes wrestling with them as important as ever.

Next steps for me? I want to check out some of the essays in her book Abolition Geography.

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