The Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference will take place March 17-18 at UC Berkeley.

The Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference promotes critical dialogue on the racial, ecological, sociopolitical, cultural, economic, and sociospatial processes that constitute the materialities of Black life and its everyday contours. The BGGSC foregrounds the geographical practices, knowledge, and interventions of African Diasporic communities while challenging, reorienting, and refuting racialized colonial conceptions of space, place, time, scale, diffusion, landscapes, and Black life. This collective gathering is designed for graduate students and advanced undergraduates to collaborate and engage with each other through Black geographical thought across disciplines, academic affiliations, and communities. 

The BGGSC will take place on March 17-18, 2023 at the University of California, Berkeley. The two-day conference will take place on the UC Berkeley campus. We will do our best to make accommodations for those who are unable to attend in person. The conference will feature panels, a roundtable discussion on the geographical imprints of Black horror films, and a keynote lecture from Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis. The core themes anchoring this conference, include Black Earth, Black Sound, Black California, and Black Futures. These curated panels are designed to offer robust discussion to a receptive, interdisciplinary audience of scholars and are not meant to encompass the totality of Black geographical inquiry. 

The Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference is organized by graduate students from Berkeley Black Geographies, the Geography and History departments at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University’s History Department and Black Studies Collective (a research workshop sponsored by the program in African & African American Studies).