• What are the roles of critical geographers in decolonizing practices, especially (in Canada) in a Truth and Reconciliation context?

• What is the place of northern and rural geographies in radical critical geography?

• What do recent interventions modeled by Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock offer to radical and critical geographers?

• Can the arts and creative praxis be put to critical and radical political work?

• What are the tensions inherent in addressing structural exclusion through legal, social, or economic inclusion, such as civil rights, social norms, or the expansion of the middle class? How are projects of boundary making between categories and spaces disturbed or reinforced by doing so? How can we apply intersectionality as part of decolonial and transnational analyses? For instance, how can the study of (international) borders help us to understand the dynamics of (domestic) poverty, and vice versa?

2016’s questions:

• How does intersectionality prompt us to reexamine ideas of structural cause and effect, and move away from totalizing “Capitalocentric” theories?

• Can relational thinking allow us to engage intersectionality as fluid rather than reify aspects of positionality as composed of natural (unproblematic) categories? How might this affect our efforts to combat the production of exclusionary social relations, given their concrete life and death implications?

• What are the tensions inherent in addressing structural exclusion through legal, social, or economic inclusion, such as civil rights, social norms, or the expansion of the middle class? How are projects of boundary making between categories and spaces disturbed or reinforced by doing so?

• How can we apply intersectionality as part of decolonial and transnational analyses? For instance, how can the study of (international) borders help us to understand the dynamics of (domestic) poverty, and vice versa?

• If hegemonic poverty knowledge individualizes responsibility for one’s socioeconomic location, what do the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore tell us about the racialization of poverty and the struggle against it? How has the political legibility of looting and property destruction changed?  How have the events of the past few years shifted or solidified the way exclusion is understood to be gendered and racialized, and how can we understand the novel geographies produced in these conflicts?

The Critical Geographies Conference is a regional event organized primarily by graduate students in Geography and related fields.  It is our aim to promote not only scholarship and critical discussion but also to support connections among students and scholars in the Pacific Northwest, understanding our intellectual pursuits as intrinsically bound to the political and social issues that motivate them.

Consistent with the long-standing goals of this conference, the emphasis is on creating a fun, engaging, and friendly atmosphere that embraces an unsettling of the “traditional” conference structure. We look forward to a wide range of spatially-oriented critical scholarship and encourage creative work on various themes from geography and other disciplines.