GOINGS ON
GOINGS ON
International Workshop on Racial Capitalism
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Date: Friday April 21, 2023
Time: 9:30 AM - 5:30 PM
Location: WCH 4.118 (Meyerson Room)
International Workshop on Racial Capitalism will have panelists present research in progress, all of which concerns the politics of racial capitalism, after which their work will be engaged by a discussant. This event features our own FGCmembers within different panels!
10:00-12:00: Panel 1: Circulations
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Laurel Mei-Singh (University of Texas at Austin), “A Political Economy of Environmental Racism in Hawai'i”
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Pavithra Vasuvedan (University of Texas at Austin) “Tracing Race and Waste in Global Aluminum Production”
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Andy Clarno (University of Illinois at Chicago): “Carceral Chicago: Weaponized Data and the Webs of Imperial Policing”
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Discussant: Christina Heatherton (Trinity College)
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1:00-3:00: Panel 2: Land
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Kaily Heitz (University of Texas at Austin), “Liberation Park and Culture Work: Cultivating Spaciousness for Black Life”
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Ricado Jacobs (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Landlessness: Remaking Exploitation and Racial Oppression in Postapartheid South Africa”
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Erin McElroy (University of Texas at Austin), “Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times
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3:30-5:30: Panel 3: In Theory
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Zachary Levenson (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and Marcel Paret (University of Utah), “The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism”
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Jordan Camp (Trinity College), “Southern Questions”
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Discussants: Christina Heatherton (Trinity College) and David McNally (University of Houston)
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Dr. Peace Mussimenta
On the same day of Friday April 21, 2023 from 11:15am -12:00pm at RLP 3.710 we will be hosting Dr. Peace Musiimenta, Senior Lecturer in the School of Women and Gender Studies, Makerere University, Uganda. She holds a Ph.D. in Gender studies from Makerere University and the University of Tromso, Norway. Dr. Musiimenta has over 15 years’ research experience with expertise in gender and socio-economic development. She conducts research gender and education, women’s socio-economic empowerment, the care economy, marriage and family relations, gender and agriculture as well as feminist pedagogies.
Critical Geographies of Race Speaker Series - Spring 2023
January 2023
This semester the feminist geography collective and the department of geography & the environment will host eight scholars for colloquia on critical geographies of race, including our incredible four postdoctoral fellows.
The next talk will be from Dr. Nadia Mosquera Muriel on January 25th, 4-5pm in RLP 0.128. See you there!
Dr. Nadia Mosquera Muriel is a 2021-2023 Provost Early Career Fellow in the Department of Geography and the Environment and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies. She is an interdisciplinary ethnographer interested in social movements, structural racism and the politics of culture in Venezuela
(Re)Claiming Space: Black Women’s Mobilizations and Land Struggles in Venezuela’s Central Coast
"Over the last twenty-five years, an umbrella of different small organizations that make up the Afro-Venezuelan movement have lobbied for the consideration of the collective property of the lands of cimarrones/as (maroon) populations in Venezuela. In turn, different members of the government of the Bolivarian Revolution (1999-present) have argued throughout this period that the Afro-Venezuelan movement lacks political organization to dismiss these claims. The present talk, based on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Parish of Caruao, a post-plantation geography comprised of six former haciendas in the Western area of La Guaira state, Venezuela challenges the “disorganization” view. In this talk, I argue for the need to rethink Black political mobilization towards land justice by examining frames of protests enacted by Black women that produce space amid displacement and the threat of dispossession. By centering fugitive, placemaking practices that range from squatting to roadblocks to protest state exclusion, I weave instructive strands from Black geographic thought that bring the “un-seeable” and the “un-geographic” into social movements literature. Through an attention to the yet-unmapped production of space by Black women, I broaden the ways in which we understand, through an intersectional lens, how contemporary Black populations form social movement networks that are misread as “disorganized,” drawing on historical practices of fugitivity to produce space in the Black diaspora.
Previous Talks
Dr. Bruno is a 2021-2023 Provost Early Career Fellow in the Department of Geography and the Environment. Her work focuses on the intersection of Black geographies, environmental justice studies, and critical physical geography. Through her work, she aims to foreground Black life, sense of place, and relationships to the environment within spaces of present-day environmental injustice. This research is currently focused on Texas, and will soon expand to various locations across the Black diaspora.
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"In this talk, I draw concepts in Black geographies, environmental justice (EJ), and critical physical geography together to examine anti-Black environmental injustice and Black sense of place in Black EJ communities along the U.S. Gulf Coast. I examine how the afterlife of slavery, which refers to the precarity and devaluation of Black life set in motion by chattel slavery, manifests socially and biophysically in the region. Heeding calls within critical physical geography to take seriously the biophysical and social co-constitution of landscapes, I integrate physical geography concepts and methods into afterlife of slavery discourse and analysis, putting forth the concept of the biophysical afterlife of slavery. This describes how the precarity and devaluation of Black life impacts the natural environments in which these lives exist. Dialectically, I also examine how Black relationships to place and environment persist within this context. Through this research, I bring attention to complex intergenerational relationships to place and environment and behold Black life and futurity experienced even within ecological degradation in EJ communities. I conduct this research through a case study of Port Arthur, Texas, a historically Black community nestled in what the US Environmental Protection Agency calls “the largest oil refinery network in the world"
Aloysie Umutoniwase receives Williams C. Powers Award
May 2022
A big congratulations to Aloysie Umutoniwase who received the Williams C. Powers Award for outstanding undergraduate students in Women & Gender Studies at the WGS Award Reception on May 17th. In addition, Aloysie has also been selected as Women & Gender Studies' nominee for the Liberal Arts Honors Thesis Award. As shown here her thesis featured zines to examine changing gender role attitudes among East African immigrants in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Dr. Bruno delivers Deford Lecture in Geosciences
May 2022
Congratulations to Dr. Tianna Bruno who delivered a Deford Lecture for the Jackson School of Geosciences-Department of Geological Sciences! Her talk titled "Environmental Injustice and Ecological Memory in the Biophysical Afterlife of Slavery", brings together critical physical geography and geoscience research extending them via an embodied, Black geographies framework.
We are deeply excited about her research that is building connections across the sciences and university. Great job!
"Not Only Will I Stare" Field Trip 2022
April 2022
On April 1st, the collective had our collective first field trip to see the exhibition "Not Only Will I Stare" with lunch after to celebrate a great semester. Curated by UT's fantastic Dr. Simone Brown, the exhibitions explores themes around surveillance and Black life and showcases efforts to undermine and resist these technologies. As the description states, "Whether through sculpture, etched Plexiglas, Xerox-based collage, archival portraiture, video, or powdered graphite drawings, the works in this exhibition distill the productive possibilities of creative innovation and of imagining Black life beyond the surveillance state." It's on display at the Christian-Green Gallery until May 21, and we highly recommend! You can read more about the exhibit and plan a visit here.
Dr. Torres named AAG Glenda Laws Award!
March 2022
Dr. Rebecca Torres has been named as the recipient of the 2022 AAG Glenda Laws Award! The award recognizes Dr. Torres' longstanding and impactful research with marginalized communities, her incredible mentoring work with undergrads, grads (so many!), and faculty, and her commitment to activist scholarship. From the AAG: This award honors those geographers who have demonstrated outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues. This award is named in memory of Glenda Laws—a geographer who brought energy and enthusiasm to her work on issues of social justice and social policy. One of her nominees, former AAG President Derek Alderman, noted "Rebecca is one of the most decorated and respected female geographers of her generation.... In the face of these accolades, Rebecca remains a well- grounded, if not humble, scholar-activist responsive to the needs of oppressed communities" and "For Rebecca, her research (and teaching) are inseparable from the process and politics of public service and outreach and the responsibility she feels for leveraging her scholarship for a greater social good. This indivisibility fundamentally challenges the traditional tendency in the Academy to cordon off teaching, research, and service."
You can read more about this amazing achievement here. A huge congratulations Dr. Torres!
Dr. Faria and Dr. Boonabaana present at University of Toronto
March 2022
A big congratulations to Dr. Faria and Dr. Boonabaana who presented the following talk: "Manufacturing Zones, Marinas, and 'Order from above': The marshes of state-private land development around Kampala, Uganda." Their talk was an event hosted by the Feminist Collective in the Departments of Global Development Studies and Human Geography/Graduate Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. Via Black, postcolonial, feminist frames of analysis, Dr. Boonabaana and Dr. Faria examine the impacts of retail development on the communities and ecologies of Lake Victoria. This collaborative research is a part of Dr. Faria's broader NSF funded project which examines global retail investment in Uganda. You can read more about this research here. Great talk, we can't wait to see this project continue to take form!
Dominica Whitesell presents research and leads mapping workshop at Makerere University
Photo above: Dominica presenting her talk.
Photo on the right: Collaborator Jasper Ankunda at mapping workshop. Read more about Jasper and her work here.
March 2022
In March, Dominica Whitesell presented a portion of her dissertation research at Makerere's University for the Department of Forestry, Biodiversity and Tourism. Her talk entitled "Global Intimate Body Mapping: Feminist Critiques and Alternative Engagements with Cartography" detailed feminist, Black, and postcolonial critiques and alternative engagements with cartography. Here she detailed how she would be utilizing a set of feminist cartographic and body-mapping methodologies for her dissertation project in Kampala. Later that month she lead a mapping workshop to co-develop and re-shape these methods collaboratively with our Ugandan research collaborators. The team will later host mapping sessions with women market traders working in Owino and Usafi. Great job to the entire team! We are excited to hear how it goes and see the all the maps produced in these sessions.
Aloysie Umutoniwase and Riley McKinzie present at the
Undergraduate Research Conference
March 2022
A big congratulations to Aloysie Umutoniwase and Riley McKinzie who received Rapoport-King Thesis Awards and presented at the Undergraduate Research Conference! Aloysie’s presented research related to her thesis which analyzes the drivers behind changing gender role attitudes among East African immigrants in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. Riley also presented her thesis research which explores the intersections of economic policy, beauty, and women’s human capital in South Korea. Great job!
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Dr. Mosquera Muriel and Dr. Heitz co-organize AAG panel:"On Politics, Poetics, and Black Senses of Place"
February 2022
On February 26th, Dr. Nadia Mosquera Muriel and Dr. Kaily Heitz co-organized a panel for American Association of Geographers 2022 entitled, "On Politics, Poetics, and Black Senses of Place," which included a presentation by another postdoc and collective member, Dr. Tianna Bruno. As they noted in the description, this panel "invites dialogue grounded in politically engaged scholarship to round out understandings of black senses of place, and the importance of culture and care to social movements that demand a recognition of Black people and the geographies of their lived relationships across the Diaspora. Following debates across the social sciences and the humanities we ask: How can Black cultural geographies ground our understanding of the political and economic production of place?" They are currently organizing the papers presented in this session for submission as a special issue of a journal. Congratulations to Nadia, Kaily, and Tianna for a great discussion! We look forward to special issue to come!
Dr. McElroy awarded Anti-Monopoly Fund fellowship
February 2022
A big congratulations to Dr. Erin McElroy who was awarded a Coalition on Economic Security’s Anti-Monopoly Fund fellowship for their Anti-Eviction Mapping Project titled "Landlord Tech Watch"! As Dr. McElroy describes it Landlord Tech Watch is a public scholarship and popular education venue for mapping out new technologies that automate eviction and gentrification. As her colleagues note, "This work is innovative and urgent. It will include undergrad research apprentices, academic publications, public-facing events and publications, and an organizing toolkit for tenants. Simply put, this is vanguard American Studies work: high level scholarship engaged with multiple publics, new technologies, and social justice all at once. It is both national and local in scope, as Erin brings Austin into their existing Anti-Eviction Mapping work in the Bay Area and NYC." And from the award: "These proposals help us better define the contours of the antimonopoly field and explore the broader, transformative goals embedded in it — including outlining a new, post-neoliberal paradigm beyond the limitations of a law-and-economics approach." You can read more about this amazing achievement here and here! This work is incredibly exciting and so well deserved. We look forward to continue learning more about this fantastic project.
Elybeth Alcantar delivers Keynote Address:
"Indigenous Reflections on Eco-Feminism
Guided by Care and Responsibility"
November 2021
On November 13, 2021, Elybeth Alcantar presented the Keynote Address for the 23rd Annual Womxn's Conference: "Intersectional Ecofeminism" hosted by the Gender, Sexuality, and Equity Coalition (GSEC) at California State University, Chico. This address titled "Indigenous Reflections on Eco-Feminism Guided by Care and Responsibility" (which is currently in the process of developing into an article) followed the interconnecting movements against pollution, mining, extractivism, and
displacement from La Mixteca of Oaxaca to Dakota Territory, and other Native communities across North-South America. This address was covered in the Orion Chico State's Independent News and you can read all about the conference and Elybeth's keynote here. A big congratulations to Elybeth!
Race, Ethnicity, Place Conference fellowships
October, 2021
A big congratulations to Anya Krishnaswamy and Alyssa Ramirez who received student conference travel fellowships to attend the Race, Ethnicity, City, and Place Conference in Baltimore from October 20th-October 23rd! They will be presenting on behalf of the Planet Texas 2050 team upon the intersectionality of race/equity in regards to environmental advocacy NGOs in Texas. Great job!
Suzanne Nimoh Receives the 2020 Society of Women Geographers Evelyn L. Pruitt Minority Fellowship
November, 2020 | Updated by Jessie Yin
Congratulations to doctoral graduate student Suzanne Nimoh! This year Nimoh was awarded the 2020 Society of Women Geographers Evelyn L. Pruitt Minority Fellowship, the 2020 University of Texas Tinker Field Research Grant and the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies graduate student research award. These fellowships will support her doctoral research in the Dominica Republic on the intersections of race, gender, citizenship and nationalism and the use of tourism as a tool of neoliberal development. This project builds from her MA research, a piece of which has just been accepted in the journal Emotion, Space and Society and her earlier intersectional work connecting critical indigenous and antiracist geographies around the issue of environmental racism. Congratulations Suzanne!
Poetry Reading with Zaina Alsous and monica teresa ortiz
March, 2020 | Updated by Jessie Yin
On March 4, the FGC students along with Dr. Pavithra Vasudevan and Dr. Caroline Faria attended a reading by poets Zaina Alsous and monica teresa ortiz of their respective works. Alsous and ortiz held a talk at UT earlier that day, partially organized by Dr. Vasudevan and collective member Meraal Hakeem. The reading was held at BookWoman, a local bookstore in Austin that proudly promotes feminist and queer literature. Dr. Vasudevan introduced the two poets as “writers not of their time.”
monica teresa ortiz, a graduate from UT, read from her publication autobiography of a semiromantic anarchist, which won the Host Publications Chapbook Prize 2019. Reading from the notes of her work, she interrogates inherited histories through an intersection of ethnicity and sexuality. She ended with reading a new poem that she has been working on.
Zaina Alsous is an abolitionist, a daughter of the Palestinian diaspora, and a movement worker in South Florida. She read a selection of poems from A Theory of Birds, which layers language to morph bird, woman, and place. Unsettling settler narratives with the bird often taking on the physical, psychic, and historical trauma of colonialism.
She also led us in an exercise to imagine how our world may look if the empire were to fall and we could return to the earth. We described many things. Green-blue-gray, a call to nature, a united Korea, or even another empire from those ashes. monica answered with open land, open sky, home as the land was before we came, citing memories of her home in the Panhandle of Texas. Zaina said that we get glimpses of that world all the time in the care work that gets overlooked. The key is to find a peaceful container for what we already have the capacity for.
Finally, we end with a quote from Alsous and a question: “Ideas made the world what it is, so ideas can unmake it.”
What do you imagine after the empire has fallen, after we return to the earth?
Collective Members with Dr. Tina Osezua
Guest Lecture from
Dr. Tina Osezua
May, 2019 | Updated by Suzanne Nimoh
In the Spring of 2019, the Feminist Geography Collective had the honor of hosting Dr. Tina Osezua in our weekly meeting, and gathering for lunch afterwards. Dr. Osezua is a Social Anthropologist and senior lecturer with Obafemi Awolo University in Nigeria, and is currently based in Austin, Texas. Dr. Osezua’s work focuses on gender based violence, human trafficking, and migrant women in the global south.
Dr. Osezua presented her fascinating work on human trafficking, religion, and social class in Nigeria. Her engaging ethnographic inquiry pushed us to think through autonomy, colonial influences on religion, methodology, and indigenous knowledge systems in Benin, Nigeria. Thank you Dr. Osezua for sharing with us, we are excited to continue learning from you!
College of Liberal Arts Undergraduate Research Week
April, 2019
Our undergraduates participated in Research Week at UT this month, and all did a phenomenal job presenting their critical, feminist research. Special acknowledgements to Devon Hsiao for having one of sixteen posters selected for the Dean's Research.
Reception and to Zaria El-Fil for winning second place in her poster session. Read more at Life and Letters, the official publication of the College of Liberal Arts.
Back Row: Kany Abdullah, Dr. Caroline Faria, Zaria El-Fil, Jessie Yin, Gabi Velsaco, Sharlene Mollett, Annie Elledge
Front Row: Devon Hsaio, Dominica Whitesell
American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting
April, 2019
This year, the Collective took the AAG annual meeting in Washington D.C. by storm! As a group, we presented posters, papers, and conducted discussions in twenty different sessions.
Our faculty members were highly active during the conference. Dr. Vasudevan presented the paper “Flesh”ing Out Racialized Toxicity: Black Feminist Materialism; as a panelist Dr. Faria spoke on innovations in teaching qualitative methods in geography
and reclaiming space in the academy; Dr. Walenta presented the paper “Undoing Homo Economicus: de-centering dominant corporate authorships”; and Dr. Torres was on an author meets critics panel on Nancy Hiemstra’s book “Detain and Deport: paper "The Chaotic US Immigration Enforcement Regime”. Additionally, multiple collaborative presentations by our faculty and students took place; graduate student Dominica Whitesell and Dr. Faria presenting on global intimate mapping, and Dr. Faria and FGC collaborator Annie Elledge presented their paper “With the Crown, I Have to Give Time”: Beauty Queens, Labor and Diasporic Identity on the Pageant Stage; Gabi Velasco and Dr. Walenta speaking on a panel about real-world experiences in sustainability higher education, and Devon Hsiao and Dr. Faria participating in an author meets critics panel where they shared thoughts on Elaine Ho’s new book, “Citizens in Motion”.
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Our students also excelled during their individual presentations while in DC. Suzanne Nimoh presented her paper “Forgetting the Anacostia River: The Removal of Black and Brown Lives from Washington, DC's Memory”; Gabi and Devon presented their senior thesis papers; Zaria El-Fil presented “Free Within Ourselves”: The Creation of Harlem’s Black Spatial Reality and Imaginary During the Harlem Renaissance. Moreover, our two sophomore students, Jessie Yin and Yasmine Soubra, impressed with their posters respectively titled Aging Out: Unaccompanied Minors at the Border and Intersectional Conflicts with the City: Kampala, Uganda.
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Congratulations to everyone for a successful AAG, and in particular to Yasmine for winning the Human Geography Specialty Group poster award, Dominica for winning third place for her presentation, Dr. Faria for being awarded the early career award by the Ethnic Geography Speciality Group, and to FGC affiliate researcher Sarah Klosterkamp for winning the Legal Geography Specialty Group Graduate Student Paper Award!
Suzanne Nimoh presenting her paper
Gabi Velasco & Devon Hsaio Receive Rapoport-King Thesis Award!
October, 2018
Congratulations to Liberal Arts students and Feminist Geography Collective members Gabi Velasco and Devon Hsiao, who each received the 2018 Rapoport-King thesis scholarship award!
Gabi Velasco and Devon Hsiao
Inspired by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Devon will use her scholarship to challenge the “single story” of China-Africa relations, undertaking a month of field research in Kampala with Chinese small-scale traders who work in that city’s wholesale sector. Using a feminist political ecology framework, Gabi’s research examines institutionalized environmental racism in Texas, with a focus on the siting and re-siting of an industrial facility in East Austin. This is the Feminist Geography Collective's fourth Rapoport award, with past awardees Annie Elledge and Dominica Whitesell now each pursuing graduate degrees in Geography! Read more at the Department of Geography and the Environment's webpage.
Congratulations again to Devon and Gabi!
"The Future of Ethnic & Racial Equity in Latin America"
Updated by Devon Hsaio | October, 2018
On October 12th, FGC students and Dr. Caroline Faria attended a workshop hosed by the Laboratory of Ethnic and Race Equity (LAESER) at UT Austin, “The Future of Ethnic and Racial Equity in Latin America”.
The particular session we went to focused on comparative racial politics in Latin America, and featured Dr. Charles Hale (UC-Santa Barbara) and Dr. Tianna Paschal (UC-Berkeley). In their presentations, as well as the Q&A sessions afterwards, a consistent theme emerged: how can we merge academics and activism? Especially in the context of Brazil’s upcoming elections, many in the room were concerned with how to translate our study and understanding of racial politics into actual results that can help people.
I leave you with two quotes from the speakers:
"Now, more than ever, it is the responsibility of academics to open and defend space for ethnically and racially centered scholarship."
-Dr. Charles Hale
"Academics must be more agile, indignant, activist, and urgent than our institutions allow us to be."
-Dr. Tianna Paschel
“22 different ways of being a terrorist”: Sarah Klosterkamp
Visits from the University of Muenster
March 23, 2018
We are excited to have Sarah Klosterkamp, PhD candidate and research associate of Political Geography at the University of Muenster, visiting our collective to give a talk on her research. Please join us!
“22 different ways of being a terrorist” – A Court-Ethnography of Criminal Proceedings against the so called ‘Islamic State’
Sarah Klosterkamp
In my PhD project “terrorism on trial” I employ ethnographic methods to observe and analyze 22 Islamic State-related criminal proceedings in front of regional appeal courts in Germany. What touched me most in the last two years sitting in court, were not the many convictions, defamations or confessions of the accused German Foreign Fighters who have returned from Syria, but the many encounters and conversations with their wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, mothers, neighbours, lawyers and guards. During this talk, I would like to share and discuss some of the most irritating moments of my field work such as being lost in the second when the woman next to me breaks up in tears after having witnessed how her brother was accused of torture.
We Presented at the Dept. of Geography Texas State Graduate Student Conference
March, 2018
Our group presented on forming and maintaining a feminist geography collective. This was great practice for a series of sessions at the AAGs we will be giving on our work. Thanks to Texas State Geography for a great event!
Spring Update from the
Feminist Geography Collective
February, 2018 by Meraal Hakeem
With the spring semester well underway, the Feminist Geography Collective in the Department of Geography has a lot planned for the coming months. Our Collective, which works to foster healthy, vibrant, and supportive academic spaces for feminist geographic research and support the scholarship of women and minority students on both a university and global scale, was excited to celebrate all the achievements members have accomplished this past semester alone. Most recently one of our members, Annie Elledge received the Rapoport Thesis Fellowship and the College of Liberal Arts Undergraduate Research Scholarship, Kany Abdullah received an Undergraduate Research Fellowship, and Meraal Hakeem and Zaria El-Fil were finalists in the Texas Undergraduate Research Showdown.
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From participating in conferences, collaborating with other feminist geographers across the discipline, to analyzing data to workshopping scholarly papers for publications, this semester is definitely going to be a busy one. We have expanded on our original focus of analyzing over 3000 archival images of newspaper coverage, advertisements, and events over 150 recorded interviews and focus groups, field notes and ephemera, and geo-located data on the fashion and beauty industry in Uganda and Dubai, UAE as part of Dr. Caroline Faria’s NSF funded research “Globalization and the Impacts of Emergent Commodity Networks on Local Economic and Cultural Geographies” to include a series of publications.
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Collective member and master’s student, Dominica Whiteshell, explores how geopolitical and geo-economics shifts are enacted through the often-overlooked spaces of consumption, malls, markets and informal pop-up shops in places like Kampala, Uganda while incorporating a feminist and postcolonial lens in her paper entitled “The Places, Power, and Politics of Uganda’s Secondhand Clothing Industry”. Member and senior Annie Elledge work on the role beauty pageants play in Uganda’s tourism industry as well as its impact on the country’s development, providing context through which the role of women, their bodies and their labor can be analyzed in correlation to the promotion of Uganda’s national tourism sites in her paper, “‘Pearl of Africa’: Colonial Presents, Miss Tourism and the Selling of a New Uganda”. Both papers are set for publication later this year.
Our Collective will also be presenting in a variety of panels at the American Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting in New Orleans later this semester. Dr. Faria, Whiteshell, and Elledge will be presenting their papers and undergraduate members El-Fil, Hakeem, and Gabi Velasco will also be presenting their poster projects as well. We are excited to see how are members will grow with our tightly-knit mentorship program and cannot wait to see all that they will accomplish!
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Be sure to learn more about the Feminist Geography Collective and check out our work here!
Collective Visit from (soon to be!)
Dr. Pavithra Vasudevan
January, 2018
Pavithra Vasudevan visited the collective as part of her visit to UT Austin this spring to give this lecture for the Center for Women's and Gender Studies. She spoke to us about organizing in geography around gender and racial diversity, and about building community and intellectual support through her own performance ethnography collective at UNC-Chapel Hill.
We're very excited that Pavithra will be joining our UT community, and the collective, in the fall as new faculty in the Department of Africa and African Diaspora Studies. Welcome Pavithra!
Guest Lecture from Dr. Martina Angela Caretta!
January, 2018
Martina Angela Caretta is a feminist geographer investigating the human dimensions of water. Her research focuses on the social issues revolving around water resources in Appalachia. Dr Caretta holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Stockholm and her doctoral research investigated gender contracts in smallholder irrigation farming systems in Kenya and Tanzania.
Dr Caretta has published on smallholder irrigation farming in the Global South, feminist participatory methodologies, emotional geography and gendered consequences of the neoliberal university.
Dr. Faria Awarded the Senate of College Council's Professor of the Semester Award!
November, 2017
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Dr. Caroline Faria was awarded the Senate of College Councils Professor of the Semester this November for her work both inside and out of the classroom. Congrats!
Texas Student Research Showdown Final Presentations
November, 2017
Zaria El-Fil made it to the finals of the UT-wide Student Research Showdown! She worked with Meraal Hakeem on a video on Uganda's secondhand clothing industry. You can read more about it here. Congrats!
Lecturing at UT's Family Weekend
October, 2017
At the end of the month, Zaria El-Fil, Annie Elledge and Dr Faria teamed up to give a lecture for UT's Family Weekend. We presented our recent research on the second-hand clothing industry in Uganda, drawn from Dominica's MA research. And we were able to showcase Zaria and Meraal's short film!
Undergraduate Research Showdown Finalists!
October 2017
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The Collective had a fantastic month in October. Annie was awarded the prestigious Rapoport thesis award, Kany received a URF for her forthcoming research on gender violence and nationalism in Turkey, and Zaria and Meraal just learned they are finalists for the UT undergraduate research showdown for their film project on second-hand clothing in Uganda. Congrats!
Learning from Minelle Mahtani​
October 2017
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We spent part of our meeting on October 27th tuning into Minelle Mahtani's talk on Toxic Geographies. For the Feminist Geography Collective, it is important to learn from other feminist geographers on the struggles they face within the discipline and how we can work to create a more welcoming environment for all geographers. You can read Minelle Mahtani's piece on "Toxic Geographies: absences in critical race thought and practice in social and cultural geography" here.
Mid-Semester Take a Breath
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Past and present FGC members got together, along with friends-of-the-collective to connect, share, collaborate and celebrate over Thai food.
"New Student Researcher Awards"​
June 29, 2017
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The Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) granted its first-ever Student Researcher Awards to Annie Elledge, a junior majoring in government and international relations and global studies, and Joseph Ricard, a mathematics senior...Read More
"Dr. Caroline Faria Receives Jean Holloway Award for Excellence in Teaching"
March 10, 2017
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We are pleased to announce and congratulate Dr. Caroline Faria as the recipient of the 2017 Jean Holloway Award for Excellence in Teaching. Created in 1970, the nomination and selection process for this award is done solely by students and is presented annually to a teacher in the College of Liberal Arts or Natural Sciences. The award was created with an endowment from past Texas Exes president Sterling Holloway and his wife, Jean...Read More
