Alliyah Moore, "Black Feminist Place-making and Spatial Practices" This paper explores the ways Black feminist theory reimagines space, place-making, and radical utopian visions within the contexts of crisis. Utilizing the prompt of crisis as an entry point, this research examines how Black women’s engagement with space functions as both resistance and resilience within structures of oppression. Drawing on frameworks from Black geography and Black ecology, this work highlights how Black women’s creation of space—whether through literal homemaking, community organizing, or rural relocation—subverts dominant narratives of power and cultivates spaces of care, autonomy, and safety.
Grounded in Black feminist theorists such as bell hooks, whose notion of "homeplace" underscores the home as a site of refuge and resistance, this research considers homemaking as a radical act of self-definition and community building (hooks 1990). By situating Black women’s space-making practices in dialogue with Black feminist utopian thought, the study proposes that such methods foster possibilities for alternative worlds and communal resilience amidst crisis. These efforts not only question existing power structures but also offer actionable blueprints for liberatory futures that prioritize well-being, environmental stewardship, and interdependence.
Ultimately, this paper argues that Black feminist approaches to space and place-making are essential in visualizing and constructing utopian possibilities within dystopian realities. This research builds on existing research into Black feminist spatial practices, emphasizing their importance as methods of resistance. It seeks to further explore how these practices foster radical imagination, boundary-breaking scholarship, and pathways toward transformative futures.
Maya Revell, "(Re)Imagining Desirable Futures through Archival and Speculative Methodologies" Black feminists have long situated education as a method of liberation. As we contend with ongoing environmental degradation and climate catastrophe, Western education systems continue to forward colonial, neoliberal, and techno-scientific solutions that perpetuate systems of harm (Nxumalo et al., 2022). These curricular models and solutions are deemed effective and promising in colonial, capitalist systems. However, decolonial scholars and critical theorists have noted that these solutions and curricular frames are foundational to the construction of white and settler futurities that erase Black and Indigenous peoples (Curley and Smith, 2023).
In striving for futures that center relationality, liberation, and ecological resilience, this paper tends to the methods that Black feminists have used to survive overlapping crises. Building on Mbembe’s assertion that the “decolonization project” requires deconstructing epistemic coloniality and imagining alternative models, this paper engages with Brian Lanker’s “I Dream a World” archival collection containing interviews and works of Black feminist organizers in the 1980s including Angela Davis, Lucille Clifton, and Sonia Sanchez (2015). This archive contains intimate Black feminist ecological knowledge which are necessary for transformative education. Black (feminist) ecologies provide “a way of historicizing and analyzing the ongoing reality that Black communities…are most susceptible to the effects of climate change…it names the corpus of insurgent knowledge produced by these same communities, which…[should] have bearing on how we… historicize the current crisis and how we conceive of futures outside of destruction” (Roane and Hosbey, 2019).
Grounded in my experience processing the Black Feminist “I Dream a World” archival collection, this paper will make visible how Black women and communities have continuously navigated environmental catastrophes while using speculative methodologies to envision and gesture toward the necessary ethics, praxis, and curriculum for creating more desirable futures.
