Urban Geography Specialty Group Early Career Scholar Panel: Decolonizing urban geography through mixed methodologies?

Type: Panel
Theme:
Sponsor Groups: Urban Geography Specialty Group
Organizers: Rachel Bok, Sarah Heck
Chairs: Rachel Bok

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Description

Within urban geography there is a strong interest in decolonizing knowledge production and reframing, retheorizing and deprivileging Western and hegemonic ways of knowing. The call for greater attention to multiple and diverse ways of knowing offers the opportunity for a more explicit focus on decolonial methodologies. Bringing together early career scholars in urban geography and urban studies across a range of methodological expertise (and epistemologies), this Urban Geography Specialty Group panel seeks to reflect on just how well existing geographic research methodologies and methods in urban research are addressing decolonial challenges – i.e., issues of power, ideology, justice, socio-spatial dispossession, difference, etc., and what we can do better. We are particularly interested in generating a rich discussion addressing the challenges of reworking methodologies and their associated methods in the 'urban' that are cognizant of historical and ongoing colonial power relations embedded within the research process in cities across the globe.

Potential topics include:
- Methodological challenges and opportunities of decentering ‘damage narratives‘ (Tuck, 2009) in social-science research
- Co-production of knowledge
- Reclaiming, refusing, reworking conventional methods/ ‘masters tools’ (Lorde, 1983) of geographical research – i.e., the map, the field site, the archive, etc.
- Politics of visibility and invisibility
- Tension in objects v subjects of research
- Practicing reflexivity in the research process

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Agenda

Type	Details	Minutes
Introduction	Rachel Bok University of British Columbia	5
Panelist	Maria Khristine Alvarez	10
Panelist	Hung-Ying Chen Durham University	10
Panelist	Zac Taylor KU Leuven	10
Panelist	Akira Rodriguez PennDesign	10
Panelist	Caroline Ponder University of British Columbia	10
Panelist	Dillon Mahmoudi University of Maryland - Baltimore County	10