Diachronic loops/deadweight tonnage/bad made measure

Abstract

This article is a relational conversation nested in black studies, science studies of blackness and race, geographies of knowledge, and black creative text. The overlying purpose is to address how the social production of biologically determinist racial scripts -which extend from a biocentric conception of the human -can be dislodged by bringing studies of blackness in/and science into conversation with autopoietics, black Atlantic livingness, weights and measures, and poetry.

Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty‐first century

“…Central to this argument is an understanding that Blackness and Black knowledge, while embodied, are not rooted solely in the biocentric body. As McKittrick explains, an over‐emphasis on the Black body (even in the form of well‐intentioned critiques of scientific racism) detracts from the study of Black life by “singularizing” and “flattening it” into mere biology (McKittrick, , p. 6). Similarly, an understanding of Black knowledge as necessarily tethered to such a “violated body” denies the existence of multiple forms of Black knowledge—including spatial knowledge.…”

Struggles for Environmental Justice in US Prisons and Jails

“…This perspective reflects Katherine McKittrick’s (2011:956) concept of “prison life”, which points to “the everyday workings of incarceration as they are necessarily lived and experienced, as a form of human life and struggle, inside and outside prisons”. I also seek to ensure that my focus on the body is also linked to the broader community of people and beings of which they are apart; hence my use of the twin emphasis on both bodies and communities, so as to avoid a framing of racial violence that replicates a biological narrative (McKittrick 2016:954). This framework is also significant because it contends that prison abolitionist practice is most effective if we work toward the abolition of dominance in all spaces and institutions across society.…”

An other geography

“… 9. I follow Katherine McKittrick here, who states that, ‘what happens when racial knowledge is mobilized solely as a site of violation through which resistant corporeal epistemologies are tasked with illuminating the inequities that underwrite the production of space? How are discussions of race and space and knowledge tethered to an analytics of embodiment that can only posit black knowledge as biologic knowledge?’ (2016: 4). …”