Primary Organizers

Ken Salo Lecturer and Community Projects Coordinator in Department Urban and Regional Planning (DURP) kensalo(AT)uiuc(DOT)edu

Merle Bowen Director of Center for African Studies (CAS) and Associate Professor of Political Science bowen(AT)uiuc(DOT)edu

Ryan Griffis Assistant Professor, School of Art & Design
rgriffis(AT)uiuc(DOT)edu

Sharon Irish Research Scholar School of Architecture and Project Coordinator Community Informatics Initiative School of Library and Information Science
slirish(AT)uiuc(DOT)edu

We propose to read critical theories of law, space and race in order to achieve a deeper understanding of how legal and spatial practices work as terrains of power that both fortify and frustrate racial inequalities. Socio-legal scholars Richard T. Ford, Nicholas Blomley and David Delaney use the terms “legal geographies of race” to describe this relatively recent intersection of critical spatial, legal and racial studies. Our group’s focus will accordingly shift between discussing key contemporary texts in this emergent interdisciplinary field and its disciplinary antecedents.

Key socio-legal texts include Blomley, Delaney and Ford’s 2001 The Legal Geographies Reader; David Theo Goldberg, Michael Musheno and Lisa Bower’s 2001 Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies and Sherene H. Razack’s 2002 Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Foundational texts on socio-spatial dynamics of struggles for social justice include Don Mitchell’s 2003 The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space; Setha Low’s 1999 Theorizing the City; Setha Low and Neil Smith’s 2006 The Politics of Public Space and Doreen Massey’s 2005 For Space. Central texts on the spatialities, historical geographies and environments of racism that could inform our work include Donald Moore, Jake Kosek and Anand Pandian’s 2003 Race, Nature and The Politics of Differences; Robert Bullard’s 1993 Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices From the Grassroots; Howard Winant’s The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since WW2. The edited volume published by the UIUC Center on Democracy, Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies provides further relevant readings.

The recent convergence of legal and spatial perspectives of racial relations and social inequalities has at least three significant consequences. First, by reading the legal in terms of the spatial and the spatial in terms of the legal, conventionalized understandings of both “space” and “law” have been destabilized and new, relativistic questions have emerged. For example, positivistic arguments about legal rights and rules obscure more than they reveal about legal questions of social phenomena than culturally specific and contested framings of those questions within a normalized spatial imagery.

Second, viewing legal practices as culturally specific ways of representing reality has opened up questions about how legal rights and ownership help produce, maintain and transform dominant constructions of social space. Third and most significant, reading the racial and social in terms of a convergence of the spatial and legal (spatio-legal) has illuminated new insights into the intertwined material and cultural conditions and consequences of social change. More specifically, territories ranging from the micro-spaces of segregated seating on city buses to states within the world system of states are bounded spatial entities whose boundaries are constructed through the authoritative projection of legal categories, images and stories onto material things. From this critical socio-spatial viewpoint, subjectivities such as the trespasser and owner, undocumented alien and citizen are figures defined by both legal and spatial practices of boundary-making. The rubric of legal geography, then, is about how symbolic and material practices interact to produce terrains of power that span multiple scales from the local, through national, international and global spaces.

We envisage this reading group as a first step towards a collaborative research network for critical spatial, critical legal and critical race theorists on campus. This network will promote debate by hosting a conference focusing on the legal geographies of race at places across the multiple scales ranging from the UIUC campus through cities in North America to international states in Africa. We would like to bring in one or two keynote speakers who could address this aspects of the legal geographies of race at multiple scales such as geographer Nicholas Blomley from Simon Fraser University or socio-legal scholars David Delaney from Amherst, MA and Richard T Ford of Stanford.