Desirable futures: Time as possibility,practice,politics

Abstract

Introduction

What is it to conceive of desirable futures in the midst of global crisis? We began this collaboration during one global crisis, and now, we bring these articles to you in a new, ongoing, crisis. Each reader might think of a different crisis as referent. Crisis after crisis, layered one onto another – climate, pandemic, colonizers’ wars – force us to confront futures shaped by structural violence from a present built on colonialism, extractivism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy. Regimes of past and ongoing violence may seem to overwhelm the present and future, crowding out the livingness and abundance cultivated alongside that harm. Yet we are witness to the resurgence of movements demanding not only harm mitigation, but abolition and decolonization, reparations and repair. Even as critical pedagogy is suppressed by rising fascism, statues of settler-enslavers are being tossed into the sea. In this special issue from the Desirable Futures Collective, we think with these ongoing struggles, to ask: how might we expose and amplify the fissures in what can appear like a seamless machinery of empire? What if time was our method?

The future is not a passive time or space, nor a singular or static destination: futures are being envisioned and forged by movements, communities, and scholars in layered and divergent ways. The contributors to this issue disrupt racial and colonial teleologies implicit in the plantation work-ethic, in techno-scientific ecological narratives, in settler imaginaries that conflate history with white possession, and in antiblack and eugenic visions that promise a future without fat bodies. Their scholarship offers a window into capacious desires, temporalities, and futurities, showing us how we might rethink relations, labor, land, and embodied life in service to just and desirable futures. We wonder with them: When do our stories begin? Who are we envisioning futures for? How might we enact reparations and restoration in orientation to divergent pasts and potential futures? How are our relations to land and to one another temporal? And how can temporality be a method for repair, recovery, refusal, liberation, and sovereignty?

This special issue builds on our “Desirable Futures” sessions at the American Association of Geographers Conference 2021, which emerged from a graduate seminar, “Embodied territory, embodied temporality.” We have brought together scholars reflecting on ways of being, living, and worldmaking that undiscipline modernist, capitalist, and colonialist constructions of time (see, e.g., Gergan et al., 2024). We ask geographers to consider how time is stratified, folded, navigated, and curated by those enacting liberatory possibilities for the future in the here and now. The eight pieces, spanning a range of study sites and methodologies, are bound by their desire for decolonization, antiracism, anticapitalism, and queer and feminist liberation. We draw out four themes that connect them. First, parallel to the rendering of embodied life and land into property, colonial capitalism also distorts time, through differentiation and disciplining, into a form of property and a tactic for garnering power. Some people are always short on time, forced to expend time to survive. However, this distortion of time into a medium of surveillance and oppression is incomplete. Thus, second, our contributors speak to livingness, desire and refusal, enabling different modes of politics, theorization, and methodologies. Third, we understand our relations with land differently when we consider temporality; sustaining our ecological relations enacts a temporal refusal – an insistence on land relations against dispossession. Finally, our contributors offer us time as method: they propose new lines of inquiry and new ways of approaching our research through the lens of temporality. In what follows, we outline the previous research that informs and inspires this intervention into temporal geographies, briefly describe the contributions to this special issue, and conclude with these four themes.

Interventions into geographies of temporality and time

Geography is deeply implicated in reproducing Eurocentric and masculinist structures that code time as linear, white, and heteropatriarchal. Time is structured by white supremacy and settler colonialism (Curley, 2021; Gupta, 2023; Joshi, 2023; Mahadeo, 2019; Mills, 2020); time is racial because of “inequalities of temporality that result from power relations between racially dominant and subordinate groups” (Hanchard, 1999: 253; cited in Joshi, 2023: 1635). Racial time is experiential (with regard to how different groups experience time itself), perceptual (relating to how we perceive the passage of historical time), and structural, in the ways that time is built differentially in power structures (Joshi, 2023). Time is racialized and colonized at different and intersecting scales – from whose time counts and whose time is wasted (Gupta, 2023; Joshi, 2023; Mahadeo, 2019; Vasudevan and Smith, 2020) to how global developmentalist narratives spatialize time, imagining places as backward or forward in time (Fagan, 2019; Mills, 2020; Rao, 2020) or in ruins and beyond repair (Dewan, 2021; Jackson, 2015; Paprocki, 2019). Colonial hierarchies are reproduced in how sweeps of time are codified into eras, determining when and how timelines end or begin (Curley and Smith, forthcoming; O’Brien, 2010; Rao, 2020; Whyte, 2021). Where O’Brien (2010) points to how Indigenous people are erased through being placed as the first people in place and also now disappeared through the figure of the “last” Native, Hunt (2018) observes the dearth of Native people in the future in science fiction (Whyte, 2018a; see also Curley and Lister, 2020; Davis and Todd, 2017).

Dominant perceptions of time are built into power structures and legal frameworks (Joshi, 2023; Mathur, 2014). Thus, subordinated groups are often expected to wait for minutes, hours, centuries, or sometimes indefinitely (Fleming Jr, 2019; Gagné 2019; Gupta, 2023; Hanchard, 1999; Tawil-Souri, 2017). Political and geopolitical interventions are bolstered by imaginaries of different places, nations, regions, or peoples being at different places in time (Fagan, 2019; Hussain, 2015; Mills, 2020; Rao, 2020). “Repetitive discourses” or “temporal rhetorics” shape how groups understand themselves within time – e.g., “Make America Great Again” (Joshi, 2023: 1636, citing Houdek and Phillips, 2020; see also Gökarıksel et al., 2019). Climate change forces the question: how can we think of global time (Baldwin, 2012; Baldwin and Erickson, 2020; Davis et al., 2019; Davis and Todd, 2017; Gergan et al., 2020; Saldanha, 2020; Whyte, 2016)? Whyte shows us that white settlers place climate, environmental, and other apocalypses in the future, when Native people have already survived these events (Whyte, 2018a; see also Curley and Lister, 2020; Davis and Todd, 2017).

Radical geographies increasingly move us from constricted and linear temporalities toward a layered sense of time as radical possibility. Feminist, Indigenous, Black, and queer of color scholarships narrate embodied life in ways that remake relations to time and space (Lanier, 2020; McKittrick, 2013, 2021; Sharpe, 2016). This scholarship provides us the future as horizon (Muñoz, 2009; Simpson et al., 2018), futures alongside marronage or revolution (Bledsoe, 2017; McKittrick, 2011, 2021; Purifoy, 2021; Winston, 2021; Wright, 2020), crip time (Kafer, 2013; Samuels, 2017), fat time (Tidgwell et al., 2018), being out of time (Rao, 2020), fugitive and wayward experiments of time and place (Belcourt, 2016; Hartman, 2019), and haunting or desiring futures (Belcourt, 2016; Best and Ramírez, 2021; Hunt, 2018; Tuck, 2009; Tuck and Ree, 2013). By engaging temporality, can we envision repair apart from relation to the original damage narratives? Can we repair otherwise, tell other stories? (Barra, 2024; Bruno, 2023; Bruno et al., 2024; Crawley, 2016; Lewis, 2024; Safransky, 2021; Thieme, 2021; Vasudevan et al., 2022).

Eve Tuck’s (Tuck, 2009, 2012; Tuck and Yang, 2014) work on desire is central to the origins of this special issue and our Desirable Futures Collective. Majerle Lister (2024) illustrates how desires are assembled and structured by both grounded Indigenous relationality and colonial violence through grazing regimes in the Navajo Nation. He elaborates on the messy non-linearity of time and how futures are made through political desires. This focus on desire resonates with attention to livingness that floods through Tianna Bruno’s (2024) article. Against a tendency in Environmental Justice literature to slot communities into roles of either heroic activist or abject victim, Bruno presents an analytic focused on quotidian forms of living to honor Black life and futurity. She writes, “There is a lot of living, loving, caring, and life that occurs between spectacular activism and dying” (2024: 3).

Alana de Hinojosa’s (2024) piece on the US–Mexico Chamizal Land Dispute shows how Anglo American history and presence are naturalized through forgetting and maintained through violence. de Hinojosa gives us the Río Grande as an animate character, an unruly river that intervenes in “settler temporality” as a specific time-space and unsettles colonial timelines that begin from white possession. DeWitt King’s piece (2024) on “demon time,” theorizes temporality in relation to demonic space (McKittrick, 2006): demon time is rooted in Black epistemologies allowing for “an iterative process of recovery from anti-blackness.” Demon time flows from Black cultural production in the barber shop, beauty salon, and strip club and demands we reorient our understanding of Black timescapes.

Monica Barra utilizes Wynter’s (1971) plot and King’s (2019) shoal to develop new visions of restoration for Black and Indigenous communities along the Louisiana coast. Barra’s reimagination of restoration pushes back against techno-scientific narratives and disrupts “singular notions of ecological loss, repair, and return” by attending to practices that reflect Black communities’ relations to place that cannot be captured by mainstream environmental science (see also Tuck et al., 2013). Rachel Goffe (2024) also draws on Wynter’s plot to situate modes of refusal (plot to rebel) and sustenance (plot of land) in her work in Jamaica, where the plot reflects an enactment of different futures rooted in Black epistemologies that upend and refuse parameters of colonial property and plantation regimes. The plot is a time-traveling set of practices (Barra, 2024: 8, citing Kimmerer, 2011; King, 2019; McKittrick, 2013; Sharpe, 2016; Whyte, 2018b). Time as seen through the lens of the plot is interwoven with intergenerational care for land, plants, and people. Restoration and reparation in this sense not only become modes of creating different presents/futures but are also deeply linked to alternative orientations to our past.

Beginning from the case of Renisha McBride, killed in 2013 while seeking help after a car crash, Aaron Mallory explores three “missing” hours during which McBride cannot be accounted for as representative of an epistemic site where antiblack and gendered violence intersect. Centering the Black feminist concept of unknowability, Mallory argues that this missing time highlights how Black women’s contributions to spatial and temporal production are structurally erased, a “scaffolding of disappearing so that the very disappearing is itself disappeared and protected from detection” (Dotson, 2017: 426; cited in Mallory 2024:2). McBride’s unknown and unknowable time, central to claims for justice, reminds us that attending to absent geographies and times is deeply important to expanding geographic understanding. Annie Elledge (2024) gives us a different perspective of absence and scarcity. In Elledge’s (2024) description of Durham, North Carolina as a dieting capital proliferating industries of dieting and thinness, fatness disrupts linear time and progress narratives that imagine a future without fat people. Histories of fatness are deeply embroiled in gendered and racial politics in which the fat body is treated as something undesirable, to be feared and erased from the future. Elledge (2024) highlights how some bodies are imagined as absent in the future, an intervention that parallels crip theory’s ableist imaginaries that equate disability with absence of futurity (Kafer, 2013).

Contributions toward desirable futures

Weaponized time: value, property, discipline

Settler-enslaver epistemologies figure land and people as “potential property to further the interests of capital, state-making, and whiteness” (Curley et al., 2022: 4; Lowe, 2015); time too falls into the sights of this property-making colonial metaphysics. Time is a strategy used by the state and capital to discipline, coerce, and frame what is possible – from the management of minutes or even seconds in the workplace (Dimpfl, 2018), to the inscription of dominant time into the law (Joshi, 2023; Mills, 2014), from the structure of checkpoints and prisons which control and restructure time (Tawil-Souri, 2017), to the management of how we think of epochs, eras, or the future (Curley and Smith, forthcoming; Fagan, 2019; Whyte, 2021). Barra (2024) begins her article on “restoration otherwise,” quoting Louisiana officials saying, “We have no time left to lose.” This seemingly protective urgency justifies the abandonment of the Black, Indigenous, southeast Asian, and low-income communities affected (Barra, 2024: 2). Urgency and the imposition of an external timeline imagine danger to be imminent and the future in ruins, and undermine community sovereignty and alternate temporalities (e.g., Curley and Lister, 2020; Davis and Todd, 2017; Gergan et al., 2020; Whyte, 2018a, 2020).

Where sometimes the representation of time is used to political effect, in other instances it is the materiality of how time is allocated (Mahadeo, 2019) that enforces and maintains “death-dealing difference” (Gilmore, 2002; Hartman, 2008). In Barra’s (2024) piece, we witness Ms. Shanice spending her days attending multiple meetings simply to try to remain in place (e.g., p. 3). As King tells us, Black people have long understood time as an organizing force because “their very survival depended on this awareness” (King, 2024: 1); “Black folks are continually losing time and the most concrete manifestation of this is premature Black death … Time is against Black people … time is weaponized against Black folks” (King, 2024: 4). As Lister (2024) illustrates, legal structures of colonialism shape and disrupt not only past but also present and future possibilities through how they sever or intervene in native relations to land, providing “the conditions for settler futurities that eclipses the futures of Native peoples.”

The future as a space of potential and possibility is weaponized against fat and disabled bodies (Kafer, 2013; Tidgwell et al., 2018). Elledge (2024) illustrates how fat people are disciplined into a future where they no longer exist either through death or “cure.” Through her study of the Durham, NC “Rice Diet” and its associated landscapes, she explores how space is reconfigured to discipline fat bodies and ensure the benefits of whiteness through aspirations to thinness. Elledge argues that anti-fat discourses and landscapes are a key aspect in constructing the US South as a threat to national progress (13). However, colonial and capitalist efforts to control time are never complete, their control never total. Demonstrating the interplay between time as disciplinary tactic and its refusals, de Hinojosa (2024) shows that attempts to discipline El Rio Grande in service of settler possession through the repetition of rumor have proved futile because the river “did what it has always done: wander across a four-to-six mile alluvial plain that had developed over centuries of accumulative meanders” (2024). The river itself refutes setter timelines which situate time and space as beginning with settler possession (see also Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Rifkin, 2017).

Making time for livingness and desire

While time can be a mechanism and strategy of disparity, dispossession, and discipline, the authors in our special issue provide an array of alternate and layered temporalities that escape, refuse, or disrupt this temporal work. Afrofuturism, African futurism, and Indigenous futurism have inspired some of our work as the Desirable Futures Collective, and the original call for papers that forged this community (e.g., among many others Dillon, 2016; English and Kim, 2013; Frazier, 2016; Hunt, 2018; Yaszek, 2006). Centering desire in research moves us away from futurity over-determined by trauma; future-oriented research both places Black and Indigenous people and other marginalized groups in the future – that is, works for their future sovereignty – and also provides creative ways to engage with, rather than erase, past and present power structures (Lookabaugh, 2023; Tuck, 2009; Tuck et al., 2013). In Lister’s (2024) analysis of Diné desires in Shą́ą́’tó (Shonto), settlers’ greedy desire has structured land relations while the messy and bundled desires of Diné people are a move toward sovereignty, whether we might classify them as decolonial or not. This is a nuanced understanding of desire, recognizing the entangled desires and future fantasies of settlers (for land, or even to become Native), working on land and law, even as Diné desires insist on Native futures.

Desire can be seen in the form of everyday practices that rebel against disciplinary time. As King tells us, “Black joy, and Black pleasure … Living, breathing, thinking, and being, one second at a time on one’s own terms is at the heart of alternative Black temporality” (King, 2024: 4). Demon time, grounded in Black libidinal economies of erotics and pleasure, is “the time where things go down” – late nights, unguarded Instagram lives, strip clubs after dark. Demon time “illustrates that western temporality is but a fiction and not a naturalized phenomenon … time is not linear, that it can be sped up but that it can also be slowed down and played with” (King, 2024: 4); as such, it is “not a cure but a treatment to anti Blackness.” Goffe (2024: 1) observes that the people who refuse to leave the land on which their ancestors worked in Jamaica respond with “a logic that runs counter to their exclusion from property, reflect[ing] spatial practices that are instead oriented towards life.” These nimble and capacious temporal strategies for the capture of land, “enact spatial practices of varied temporalities: rooted in belonging to place, but also alighting provisionally. In apparent paradox, these spatiotemporalities can be also be simultaneous …”.

Such alternate temporalities are crucial. Bruno (2024) shows how environmental justice communities, through data and imagery, have been placed in roles of either abject victim or activist savior. This argument connects to a growing swath of scholarship centering desire and livingness rather than trauma. For Tuck, compiling a litany of trauma is a colonial model that assumes change comes from outside and can harm communities by portraying them as fundamentally damaged (Tuck, 2009, 2012). Desire-based frameworks instead attend to Indigenous people – and here, Black Environmental Justice communities – in livingness, now and in the future. Resonating with these claims, Jovan Scott Lewis (2024) asks that in considering repair for Black communities, we must disassociate what repair might mean from the original injury.

Time and land

Moving away from the assumption that places and spatial arrangements are transparent and legible (McKittrick, 2006), Black Geographies scholarship (McKittrick, 2006; McKittrick and Woods, 2007; Woods, 1998) and Indigenous theories of land as pedagogy and land education (e.g., Goeman, 2015; McCoy et al., 2016; Simpson, 2014) approach land as relational, and as connected to alternative and fugitive knowledge and practices. In theorizations of land that make space for Black and Indigenous futurity, we find ways of thinking about and practicing land in/with place that allow for desirable and abundant futures (Collard et al., 2015; Daigle and Ramírez, 2019; Fujikane, 2021; Lloréns, 2021; Purifoy, 2021).

In Barra’s and Goffe’s articles, people negotiating environmental destruction and placelessness connect to land through temporal claims that transcend land as law or property. Barra ends her paper with Ms. Shanice saying, “we’re gonna be here;” Goffe begins with “we’ve always been here.” As a middle-class Jamaican, Goffe has been taught to expect those with whom she speaks to think of land title and property as security. What she finds instead are ways of belonging that stretch time and space through claiming connection to place that cannot be alienated – whereas land as property contains both the possibility of eventual alienation and an echo of logics that also made people’s ancestors into property. Reading Goffe alongside Barra’s work, we notice how Black community placemaking is made possible through temporal strategies. Against “narratives of decline,” communities remain: “As simultaneously aspirations (plots) and disruptions (shoals), Black ecological practices … are reformulations of human-environment relations otherwise” (Barra, 2024: 7), which mend human and nonhuman kin relations across time.

Reading desire through these varied temporal relations with land destabilizes colonial and racial teleologies. By attending seriously to Diné desires – for everything from grocery stores, to land for grazing, to electricity – Lister (2024, 14) insists we understand desire as messy and grounded: “The land is fraught with different meanings, uses, and practices such that multiple desires shoot out from it like uncoordinated fireworks.” Weaving together Tuck’s desire framework with Coulthard (2014) and Simpson’s (2017) notion of grounded normativities, Lister suggests that Diné desires are bundled with the land’s history and present, such that even when in conflict or incoherent, these “grounded desires” ensure sovereign futures. For de Hinojosa (2024), it is the Rio Grande’s livingness that refuses to behave according to “state-imposed fixities,” instead rupturing these settler colonial displays of power and knowabilities, indicating the impermanence of settler society and the state’s incomplete control over futurity.

Time as method

In developing the Desirable Futures Collective and reading our colleagues’ contributions, we have come to understand time itself as a method. Time becomes a method when we attend to the function of time and the temporal in our spatial relations; that is, when we watch for when and how time comes up in our work – whether in broad swaths, in minutes allocated, in expectations of the future, or in qualities of different times of day (dawn, dusk, sunset, sunrise). New insights emerge when we begin from time as a lens to understand our chosen research questions. King proposes that when we center racialization of time in our analysis, we can see that, “time is much more than simply an agent and apparatus of capitalist labor regimes as it is also a method of racialized violence” (King, 2024). Mallory’s attention to time is what allows him to understand how missing time functions both in antiblackness and through a Black feminist unknowability. Time becomes a means to making a political argument, and a method for refusal, survival, or justice. Thus, claims for white innocence in relation to past violence, for instance, may be challenged by a folding of time that connects past and present (Joshi, 2023). Counted in hours, it is through claims about McBride’s missing time that those who love her seek justice (Mallory, 2024).

Time as a method includes the fluid ways that people might manage or play with time. For King, the production of alternate tempos and temporalities, specifically through sound technologies, means that time can be sped up or slowed down in ways that index Black interiority and sociality: the “ability to move outside of normative time and space are predicated on Black agency, resilience, and resistance but not solely as Black pleasure and play are also mechanics through which this time jumping happens” (King, 2024; citing Weheliye, 2005). In Goffe’s research, temporalities flit between contingency and eternity, through the capture of land. Temporal play can disrupt anti-Black time, for instance, through the staging of theater productions that intervene in the expectation of “Black patience,” the “abiding historical demand for black people to wait: whether in the hold of the slave ship, on the auction block, or for emancipation from slavery” (Fleming Jr, 2019: 587). Similarly, in Bruno’s work, time as method allows us to see and unsettle the roles that environmental justice communities have been slotted into as savior or abject victim.

Conclusion

You always told me, ‘It takes time.’ It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces’ and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want, for your progress? (James Baldwin, 1989, cited in Joshi, 2023: 1645)

For three hundred years, we’ve given them time. And I’ve been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change (Fannie Lou Hamer, in Brooks and Houck, 2011: 62; cited in Joshi, 2023: 1645).

Despite our emphasis on desire, livingness, and the future, it must be stated this collective first came together during bleak times. Not only were we grappling with a global pandemic and public health crisis that disproportionally affected the Global South and Black, brown, Indigenous, and disabled communities in the US (McClure et al., 2020), but we were also entering the aftermath of global protests in defense of Black Lives in the summer of 2020. As we write this introduction, over thirty thousand Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military in yet another chapter of genocidal violence against colonized peoples. These waves of despair have grounded us in the present while making us understand that the future cannot be this. What is the future where people are taken care of; where there is no more policing; where displaced people have returned to their homelands, their homes rebuilt and the soil restored?

Collectively, we theorize how time is disciplined or valued by capitalist, settler, and white supremacist structures and offer lessons on how these uses of time can be disrupted and refused in service of more expansive futures. These projects offer insights into spatial production and particularly what it means to recover, resist, or surface submerged times, spaces, lives. Contributors enliven temporal geographies with Indigenous and Black Studies, crip studies, and queer studies. In this collective work, we also read across Black and Native futurities, seeking to avoid the impasse, “in which Black and Native presents and futures cannot be enacted or even thought about together” (Curley et al., 2022: 2). Rather, we work to build a decolonial constellation of “subordinated temporalities” (Daigle and Ramírez, 2019; Joshi, 2023; Simpson et al., 2018). Since time is a strategy through which dominant groups enact and perpetuate power, we reconfigure these temporalities enmeshed in violence, in order to seek alternate futurities for a capacious and abundant world.

We might ask: how do our desires make our futures (Collins, 2018; Tuck, 2009)? How might alternate temporalities renegotiate the divisions of nature and culture, sentience and animacy, the human and “inhuman others” implicit in modernity (Gergan, 2017; Jackson, 2013; McKittrick, 2014; Wynter, 2003)? If our pasts, presents, and futures are intimately entangled across geographies, generations, and territories, what do we owe each other?

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

It is hard to express how much the Desirable Futures community has meant to us as individuals and as a collective. We are very grateful to all the participants and attendees at the 2021 Association of American Geographers Conference, students in the 2020 graduate seminar, and particularly to everyone who has remained in community with us ever since. Thank you so much to Natalie Oswin for supporting us from the beginning, and to Kate Derickson and the editorial board for helping it come to fruition. We were also fortunate to have generous and insightful reviewers.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Carlos Serrano

Sara Smith

Mabel Denzin Gergan is Assistant Professor in Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her research is based in the Indian Himalayan region and examines its relationship with ‘mainland’ India. She is a scholar of environmental justice, indigeneity, and race with special interests in political ecology, environmental humanities, and decolonial theorizing.

Pallavi Gupta is a feminist political geographer. In her current research, she examines the intersections of caste, labor, space, and waste within urban public infrastructure. Pallavi studies racial capitalism and racialization in relation to caste and draws on labor geographies, Dalit studies, Black feminism, and infrastructural studies. Pallavi is a founding member of two writing collectives, Desirable Futures and Against Colonial Grounds. Pallavi received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and has published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Antipode, Political Geography, Economic and Political Weekly, and Human Geography, to name a few. You can email her at pallavi@hawaii.edu

Lara Lookabaugh is a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is an interdisciplinary feminist geographer whose research engages decolonial and Indigenous geographies, feminist political geography, critical development studies, and geographies of memory in Latin America and the Southern United States. Lara is a founding member of two editorial and writing collectives, Desirable Futures and Against Colonial Grounds, that bring together scholars to explore colonial constructions of time and futurity and the intersections of Black and Indigenous Geographies.

Caitilin McMillan is a PhD Candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her doctoral research focuses on human rights and migration in Europe. She uses ethnographic and qualitative methods in her work to explore migrants’ experiences of navigating asylum processes and brings attention to the ways humanitarian workers and migrants collaborate in everyday ways to carve out survivable conditions and push back on hostile political mandates. Her work contributes to a feminist political geopolitics that highlights how large-scale systems of inequality in development, citizenship status, race, and gender become visible in people’s everyday lives.

Carlos Serrano is a PhD Candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His current project focuses on the relationship between US empire-building, policing, urban development, and race in his hometown of Miami, Florida. He draws on Black Geographies, political geography, political economy, and community organizing across his scholarship.

Sara Smith is a Professor of Geography and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She researches the relationship between territory, embodied life, and the political use of time. She has written on these topics in the Ladakh region of the Indian Himalaya and in the US South. She is the author of Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Marriage, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold, Political Geography: A critical introduction, and co-editor of Feminist Geography Unbound: Discomfort, Bodies, and Prefigured Futures.

Pavithra Vasudevan (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Their research addresses toxicity as a manifestation of racial violence, capitalist entanglements with state and science, and the abolitional possibilities of collective struggle. Vasudevan is a recipient of the 2022–23 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for her first book project, A Toxic Alchemy: Race and Waste in Industrial Capitalism. Their research is grounded in collaboration and creative praxis, reimagining scholarship as storytelling in service to building a better world.

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