Social geography I: Anti‐racism,implacable whiteness and decolonizing Anglo‐American geography

Abstract

Transnational events including worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, #Rhodes Must Fall and university encampments across Europe and the US in resistance to Israel’s occupation and bombing of Gaza have provided momentum for a decolonial ‘turn’ throughout the education sector. By exploring the emergence of anti-racist decolonial themes in Anglo-American geography I argue that the whiteness of the discipline, its roots in colonial modernity, as well as the neoliberal production of whiteness in Higher Education stymies decolonizing agendas. Nevertheless, I further demonstrate how anti-racist decolonial perspectives are being reconfigured by geographers with the potential to rethink geographical theory, pedagogy and practice.

I Introduction

Social geography has long been a site for examining ‘constructions of race and racism’ (Bonnett, 1996), marking out multiple ‘geographies of exclusion’ (Cresswell, 2013; Hopkins, 2020; Sibley, 1995). A recent development has seen a ‘turn’ to decolonial approaches, unsettling the conventional rubric of geographical thought and practice. This entails recognizing the contingent, incomplete and at times parochial constitution of Anglo-American geography. In this first report, I examine how a decolonizing impetus is emerging in geography, the ways this is made manifest, and where it risks being stymied by the discipline’s implacable whiteness. Here, I explore the challenge of ‘becoming decolonizing’ (Barker and Pickerill, 2020; Esson and Last, 2020) in three critical ways. The first examines whiteness and the problematic of decolonizing Anglo-American geography; the second explores exclusionary knowledge, pedagogy and practice; and the third distils the relationship between practices of neoliberal whiteness in universities and the architecture of race and place.

II Whiteness and the challenge of decolonizing geography

Geography, in its Anglophone rendering, is currently undergoing what might be described as a ‘decolonial turn’. However, this ‘turn’ remains partial, fragmented and foreshadowed by the discipline’s colonial roots (Esson, 2020; Griffiths and Baker, 2020). Notwithstanding this, Puttick (2023) identifies an upsurge of citations on ‘antiracism’ and ‘decolonization’ in a selection of geographical education journals for schoolteachers. We can extend this count to include Higher Education academic journals, where a decolonial turn can be traced in a plethora of publications. This includes a Special Section on decolonizing geographical knowledge in Area (2017), the publication of textbooks (Radcliffe, 2022), themed interventions in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2017) and a further Special Section on decolonization in the Journal of Historical Geography (2019). Much of this scholarship is stimulated by transnational events including Black Lives Matter protests, the #Rhodes Must Fall campaign and student activism on university campuses concerning Israel’s occupation and bombing of Palestine. It is also buoyed by the 2017 Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) conference theme, ‘Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world’.

Given geography’s foundational relationship with Empire, its brutal colonial past and the role it played in the production of racial types (Bonnett, 1996; Livingston, 1992), it would amount to academic conceit to presume geography can simply emerge unblinking from the shadow of empire, in a newly minted ‘decolonial’ form. Moreover, decolonizing ‘is not a metaphor’ as Tuck and Yang (2012) emphasize, but involves the ceding of lands, territories and resources by settler communities. We should then be cautious and reflective when it comes to pursuing geographical research through the decolonial turn. Rather, a hope for geographers is that ‘becoming decolonizing’ (Barker and Pickerill, 2020) can enable us to mobilize these tendencies in politically meaningful, relational and reflexive ways (Agha et al., 2024). However, a major obstacle on the journey to becoming decolonizing is that Anglo-American geography has been, and continues to remain, an ostensibly white discipline (Dutta and McSweeney, 2024; Faria et al., 2019). Whiteness is embedded in its historical foundations, its institutional apparatus and the networks of university students, teachers and researchers that constitute the ‘geographical community’ (Delaney, 2002; Mahtanni, 2014). In the North American context Mahtanni (2014: 360) further reflects how a growing interest in race and colonialism in the discipline is nevertheless accompanied by, ‘ongoing subordination and marginalization of scholars of colour within geography departments’ generating ‘toxic geographies’ of exclusion and anti-Black violence. The theme is identified in Tolia-Kelly’s (2017) research with Black and minoritized academics working in geography departments in the UK and US, as well as amongst Black and minoritized postgraduates (Ahmet, 2020; Jordan et al., 2022).

There is certainly evidence to support current concerns regarding whiteness, power and minority ethnic marginalization in Anglo-American geography. Data gathered for the Association of American Geographers (AAG) by the Great Lakes Feminist Collective in 2015 reported 88% of North American geography staff and 91% of tenured academics identify as ‘white’ (Derickson, 2017). Examining data on US geography departments between the decade 2005 to 2015, Faria et al. (2019) found the Black and Hispanic presence to be a meagre 4-5 percent, half of other disciplines in 2015. Recently, Dutta and McSweeney (2024) remark on the more general decline of US geography when it comes to graduate enrolment, with many students finding their way onto university geography modules and programmes via majoring in other areas. They report that this serendipitous pathway to recruitment is one rarely pursued by Black and Indigenous students, who for financial reasons are risk averse so opt for vocational subjects.

As part of its report on the status of geography the AAG (2023) examines patterns and trends on ethnicity, identifying some growth in geography bachelor’s degrees from Hispanic, Latinx and a few mixed-heritage students, but little change in degree conferrals for American Indian, Alaska Native and Black/African Americans. Indeed, the AAG record no growth in Black/African American students since 2010, which significantly impacts upon the dwindling number of postgraduate and Faculty numbers. This is evident in Jordan et al.’s (2022) thorough overview of postgraduate geography in the US, contrasting the rate of domestic and under-represented minority doctoral degree conferrals, with those of white recipients in geography, the social sciences and the academy between 1997 and 2019. During this 23-year period, they found 81.1% of US successful geography PhD graduates were white, markedly above that of the social sciences at 70%. They declare, ‘Racial and ethnic representation is at present evidently low in geography’ (2022: 194) identifying a stark numerical under-representation gap amongst Black and Indigenous cohorts compared to their white counterparts.

The picture in the UK is not altogether dissimilar. Combining Higher Education Statistical Analysis (HESA) with other UK national data sets, Desai (2017) found a paucity of BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) people study Geography in UK universities (6.6%) and fewer engage in postgraduate study (4.4%). BME staff remain ‘chronically under-represented’ (p. 322) in the discipline (4.3%), a figure that is almost half that found in other subject areas (8.2%). Where 7.3% of UK national professors are BME, the numbers in Geography are comparatively sparse (1.4%). This is less surprising if we consider Puttick’s (2023: 5) claim that, ‘School geography teaching similarly remains overwhelmingly white’, indicating that the roots and branches of geography are bleached in whiteness. Little wonder that the question, ‘Why isn’t my Professor Black?’ trended on social media, received national press coverage, and has been a subject of academic debate (Tate and Bagguley, 2017). In a belated attempt to mend the broken pipeline between undergraduate, postgraduate and academic geography, a recent initiative by the UK’s main funding body for social science doctoral study, is for participating ESRC DTP (Economic and Social Science Research Council, Doctoral Training Partnerships) institutions to ring-fence two studentships for suitable UK domicile Black and minoritized candidates through the Action for Equality scheme from 2021. It is too early to tell if this strategy will be successful, considering the low intake of Black and minoritized candidates on geography degrees identified, and the fact that redbrick universities remain the key agents operationalizing and recruiting from DTP funding. Nevertheless, for change to happen such action is necessary.

Given the status of Anglophone geography, Tate and Bagguley, 2017 bluntly assert that anti-racism has failed in UK universities. This, they proclaim, is due to white power and privilege, ‘We cannot ameliorate something which we think does not exist because it is unsayable or deniable’ (p. 294). An inability to reckon with white privilege in the upper echelons of the university sector, then makes it almost impossible to develop meaningful initiatives around decolonization. The issue of ‘unsayability’ is underscored in Ahmed’s (2012) interviews with diversity practitioners in Australian and British universities where, ‘racism is heard as an unhappy word’ (p. 154), that generates negative feelings, so is rarely disclosed, bolstering the ‘regime of unsayability’ (Tate and Bagguley, 2017). Indeed, Ahmed suggests institutional promotion of ‘Diversity can be a method for protecting whiteness’ (p. 147), being a ‘happy word’ for corporate marketing, rather than a means to enact structural change. While the UK and US are perceived as the institutional heartlands of geography, it is evident that across all areas – from schooling, graduate, postgraduate and staffing recruitment – they lag behind their respective national demographics on ethnicity, and those of most other disciplines. Currently, the statistical portrait of Anglophone geography briefly sketched above, remains one of implacable whiteness.

III Decolonizing geographical knowledge: Exclusions, pedagogy and practice

The whiteness of geography remains a deeply fraught paradox for a subject identifying as the ‘world’s discipline’ but enacting stark ‘geographies of exclusion’ (Sibley, 1995). Given the whiteness of Anglophone geography it is necessary to ask how this shapes geographical thinking today? For example, most of the luminaries in geography are invariably able-bodied, middle-class, cis-gender, white men (Kinkaid and Fritzsche, 2022). This impacts upon understandings of what knowledge is deemed central, and that which is peripheral. One way in which we might challenge the hegemony of whiteness is by becoming aware of it as a racial norm that privileges a few, at the expense of the many. Thus, in responding to the burning question, ‘Why is our geography curriculum so white?’, Esson (2020: 710) concludes, ‘it is a product of a coloniality-induced institutional racism’. The point being made, is that racism is endemic and as a structural feature of contemporary society, is also manifest in academia. Recognizing this power and how it shapes the discipline is a starting point for effecting change.

As De Leeuw and Hunt (2018) acknowledge, the concept of decolonization is not a fixed concept with clearly delineated practices, but is complex and contested, referring not only to Indigenous land rights but to knowledge making practices. This might entail considering how geography’s past histories connect with the ‘colonial present’ (Agha et al., 2024; Gregory, 2004). These power relations shape geographical knowledge, theories, concepts and research, coming to ‘permeate all forms of knowing about and understanding the world’ (Radcliffe, 2017: 329). For example, popular concepts such as intersectionality maybe deployed without reference to their Black feminist roots (Hopkins, 2019), the practice of student geography fieldtrips is seldom located within colonial legacies of power (Abbott, 2006), and there is a need to situate contemporary conflict such as Gaza through a decolonial approach recognizing longstanding Israeli violent occupation and expansionism (Agha et al., 2024). Without a decolonial imperative geography’s knowledge base risks producing a fictive archaeology of whiteness.

Indeed, Puttick and Murrey’s (2020) review of the geography school national curriculum in England and Wales, identifies a lack of engagement with race and coloniality, part of geography’s ‘sanctioned ignorance’ (Radcliffe, 2022: 81). This omission evokes ‘blindness’ and ‘silences’, leading them to conclude that, ‘geography education … has a problem with race’ (p. 126). To help overcome this ‘problem’, Lambert and Morgan (2023) in their recent text, Race, Racism and the Geography Curriculum, indicate that the school geography syllabus needs to change to reflect British multicultural society. To achieve this, they advocate teachers’ work becomes ‘more racially literate and finally addresses the unavoidable truth that geography in school is still perceived as a white subject – in which white normativity shapes the data selected for study and the explanations offered’ (p. 9).

Geography graduate degree programmes are not immune from these ‘silences’. In surveying 32 syllabi from graduate-level ‘Introduction to Geography’ and ‘Geographical Thought’ courses in the US, Kinkaid and Fritzsche (2022) focus on a series of colonial, gender and ‘race’ exclusions. They found geography’s entanglements with colonial enterprises often went unspoken. A second exclusion concerns a ‘temporal bracketing’ where issues such as racism and colonialism are relegated to the past, giving the false impression that ‘race is somehow no longer a problem …’ (p. 2477), forming part of geography’s ‘progress narrative’ (p. 2481). Indigenous geographies have sought to disturb and unsettle these modernist assumptions (Arnold et al., 2023; Country et al., 2016; Daigle and Sundberg, 2017). A third exclusion entails ‘structural marginalization’; this includes race and gender being siloed, combined into a single lecture on ‘difference’, or marked as further, rather than recommended reading. Recently something similar has happened in my own institution where feminist, queer, radical Marxist and critical race geographies – a cornerstone of critical geographical thought – has been disbanded for further study skills teaching. A fourth mode of exclusion involves an outward performance of geography’s exclusions, ‘when a syllabus or narrative acknowledged its exclusions regarding colonialism, racism, and gender, but did nothing to change the dominant narrative it was reproducing’ (ibid.). What Kinkaid and Fritzsche demonstrate is the inherent contradiction of this self-aware position, that has the power to change things but chooses not to. They discuss Cresswell’s (2013) popular graduate textbook in the field as an example. Not only because a discussion of race and colonialism is relegated to a final section on ‘Geography’s Exclusions’, but because, for Kinkaid and Fritzsche (2022), Cresswell knowingly reproduces the very conditions of this exclusion. Though Cresswell’s text is thorough and knowledgeable, I have wondered why a brief, final sub-section on Black Geographies is followed by a question mark, ‘Black Geographies?’ – I remain perplexed by the tentative title and quivering question mark. Perhaps, as Esson et al. (2017: 384) imply such ‘decolonial thinking could do more harm than good’, if it is tokenistic or fails to address structural racism and wider societal inequalities more generally.

For Spivak (1988) epistemic violence constitutes the colonial subject as Other. It is compounded by a structural silence, the fact subaltern archives maybe destroyed under colonial rule, that peasants and lower-class people in the postcolonial South may not receive an education so their testimonies go unrecorded, or that those in power ideologically produce accounts that support the interests of the dominant group. Indeed, much Indigenous knowledge is spoken and embodied rather than written. For example, Aboriginal communities in Australia engage in ‘yarning’, passing down ancestral knowledge through story-telling, memories, song, poetry and artwork (Barwick and Nayak, 2024; Country et al., 2016). Epistemic violence permeates global north geography when it comes to the structure, format and production of knowledge in academic publication. Jazeel (2016: 202) catalogues how for geography journals such as Progress in Human Geography and Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography, around 95% of articles published in 2014-15 were from institutions in the global north. In a survey of Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Wood (2023) denotes how from a total of 4, 976 publications just 327, 6.5%, include the terms ‘African Americans’ or ‘Blacks’. To this extent we must recognize the limits of our geographical knowledge as partial, incomplete and at times, provincial in its constitution.

Engaging with anti-racist decolonial perspectives is high risk, challenging but not without reward. By locating Western modernity both geographically, and historically as a particular epoch in time, we might begin to understand it as a social construction itself, formative of partial, contingent and situated truths. Decolonial trajectories are inevitably uneven due to time, place and context (see Sidaway, 2023). Where post-Enlightenment thinking has separated people from place, Indigenous perspectives, southern theory and subaltern epistemologies challenge this modernist binary. Efforts toward ‘becoming decolonizing’ are gaining more traction in certain settler-colonial countries, where holistic and embodied approaches to geographical thought and practice can be found (Arnold et al., 2023; Barker and Pickerill, 2020; Shaw, 2006).

This type of embodied decolonial thinking is instigated in a triangular fusing of collaborative research between geographers, the Indigenous Yolnu and Bawaka Country in Northern Australia (see Country et al., 2016). The authors include Bawaka Country, an Aboriginal term for land that encompasses human and non-human species, as a formative part of co-authorship. As the authors explain, ‘Country includes humans, more-than-humans and all that is tangible and non-tangible and which become together in an active, sentient, mutually caring and multidirectional manner in, with and as place/space’ (ibid: 456). Through this ‘more-than-human’ decolonial frame the authors collaboratively work to dismantle binaries between subject/object, Indigenous/non-Indigenous, human/non-human, in a concerted attempt to instigate processes of co-becoming. Country, human and more-than-human relationships are mutually constitutive, where each is shaped by the other in an intricate web of interdependencies. A central part of this relational approach is to undo academic hierarchies, decentre the human and attend to the agency of a world that is always ‘more-than-human’.

In Canada the project of decentring the human and generating knowledges beyond those associated with Anglophonic modernity, was bravely trialled by Daigle and Sundberg (2017) when re-designing their first-year undergraduate geography module at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver. As part of an initiative to decolonize the curriculum, they firstly manoeuvred away from Eurocentric knowledge by including the ‘subaltern’ voices of Black, Indigenous, feminist, queer scholars and activists in their teaching and reading lists. Secondly, while UBC was co-constructed by lecturers, students and others on the campus as ‘student space’, Daigle and Sundberg break the silences surrounding this representation to highlight how the university is built on Indigenous land belonging to the Musqueam people. Thirdly, by bringing Musqueam and other local Indigenous communities into the classroom, the authors subvert the norms of academic pedagogy and knowledge production in the pursuit of participatory knowledge. However, the experimental learning and teaching activities received mixed responses from geography students, some felt unsettled and annoyed by the approach claiming it was ‘not objective’, thereby reproducing geography’s modernist narrative of the discipline as inherently factual and neutral. Nevertheless, others felt the situated approach was pedagogically transformative, making them rethink campus geographies and ‘unsettle geographical knowledges’. Clearly, ‘becoming decolonizing’ is a slow, hopeful but faltering journey – one that unfolds unevenly across different places – yet affords a means through which we can uncouple binaries between the global north and south by offering a relational, embodied and more-than-human account of the social and material world (Country et al., 2016; Daigle and Sundberg, 2017; De leeuw and Hunt, 2018).

IV Decolonizing space: Neoliberal whiteness and the architecture of race

In Bristol, UK, stood the monument of Edward Colston, a Seventeenth Century slave merchant, who had long ignited controversy. In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter activists felled the statue, before dragging and dumping it into Bristol Harbour to resounding cheers. Four protestors were tried, but in the end acquitted of criminal damage. As historian David Olusoga went on to declare, ‘the real offence was that a statue to a mass murderer was able to stand for 125 years, not that the statue was toppled’ (The Guardian, 05/01/22). For Black Lives Matter activists, the dethroning of Colston is both a means of rejecting the city’s colonial forebearers and a way of decolonizing space, opening it out to new multicultural forms of belonging, a more progressive, ‘global sense of place’ (Massey, 1996).

The dismantling of the Colston statue bears resemblance to another decolonizing event, the #Rhodes Must Fall campaign. Cecil Rhodes, the so-called father of Apartheid, founded Rhodesia through the British South Africa Company, it was promptly named after him, later becoming Zimbabwe and Zambia. After entering South African politics Rhodes became Prime Minister and used the law to appropriate lands belonging to Indigenous Black Africans disenfranchising them from taking part in elections. #Rhodes Must Fall began at the University of Cape Town in 2015, where a bronze statue of Rhodes is erected. Student protests against institutional racism and white supremacy, were mirrored across other South African campuses and beyond. First set up in 1902, the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship for postgraduate studentships at the University of Oxford derives from a personal endowment from Rhodes of £100, 000. Following events in Cape Town, Oxford students and activists demonstrated outside Oriel College, where a stone monument of Rhodes presides, demanding the university decolonize education and work against institutional racism.

Legacy endowments such as the Rhodes Scholarship are also commonplace in many US universities, where the norms of whiteness are baked into institutional architecture. The University of Cincinnati offers a case in point. Cincinnati is over 40% Black, yet Black students comprise merely 8% of the university’s graduate population. As Tichavankunda (2022) illuminates, slave-owner Charles McMicken, a former benefactor of the university, reserved funding strictly for the ‘education of White boys and girls’. McMicken is identified by Tichavakunda as both a slave-owner and rapist, having sired children from African American women classed as chattel. Throughout the campus his name appears on buildings, statues and streets. However, most white students are oblivious of these past transgressions and rarely consider them. As Inwood and Martin (2008) observed at the University of Georgia, Southern USA, where the Confederate flag and memorials to past slave owners appear on campus, such insignia is ‘whitewashed’. However, Tichavankunda (2022) delves further, interviewing 23 Black students at the University of Cincinnati regarding their knowledge of McMicken. Unlike their white counterparts, many Black students gleaned knowledge of McMicken as a slave-owner through the African American Cultural Resource Centre on campus, the United Black Student Association and a Black professor. This suggests that corporate whitewashing can be disclosed through Black Geographies and decolonial knowledge on university campuses. Notably Black students were not shaken by the racial insignia, believing it was part of navigating white supremacy in US society more generally; they anticipated anti-Black hatred, were prepared for micro-aggressions and produced counter-narratives around this.

The neoliberal whiteness of Anglo-American universities is exemplified in the practice charging international students often over double the degree fees of domicile students and doing little to mitigate punitive visa restrictions. In other sectors this could appear a discriminatory act, tantamount to institutional racism. In many universities, even those based in the global city of London, portraits of white figures frequently adorn and dominate the walls (Ahmet, 2020), emphasizing white supremacy and elitism (Bonds and Inwood, 2016). The architecture of race is further evident at the headquarters of the RGS-IBG at Lowther Lodge, Kensington Gore, London. Griffiths and Baker (2020) discovered various maps, portraits and diaries of geographical explorers who propagate the idea of race superiority, celebrate violent conquest and designate native people as savages. They reflect upon how unwelcoming these spaces might be for racially minoritized people who may be interested in studying geography. However, places such as Lowther Lodge can also be spaces for decolonizing activities. Following the RGS-IBG 2017 conference theme ‘decolonizing geography’, the University of Central London has worked collaboratively with the RGS-IBG using Lowther Lodge as a site for a half-day fieldtrip with first-year undergraduate students (Jazeel et al., 2022). The aim of the excursion is to both make students aware of geography’s problematic colonial history, but also to show ways in which the discipline is changing, as the RGS-IBG opens itself up to critical scrutiny and new forms of learning.

V Conclusion

In this opening report I have focused on the problematics and possibilities for decolonizing Anglo-American geography. Challenges include the overbearing whiteness of Anglophone geography, where disciplinary history, language and imperial tradition conspire to maintain privilege, with bodies such as the RGS-IBG, AAG and their associated journals remaining important power-brokers of global north modern geography. However, ‘becoming decolonizing’ (Barker and Pickerill, 2020; Esson and Last, 2020) can also mean building alliances and creating new possibilities within the institutional apparatus. Despite the ubiquity of whiteness in Anglophone geography, anti-racist decolonial activities are evident within the AAG and RGS-IBG, including the sponsorship of a burgeoning number of Special Issues, conference streams and teaching initiatives on decolonizing geography.

Furthermore, accolades such the Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-racism Research and Practice, sponsored by the AAG, are important for enriching the profile of Black and anti-racist scholars. Rose, the first (and only) Black president of the AAG in 1976, had a longstanding interest in engaging communities when it came to understandings of racial oppression and social justice. An important, if belated intervention in British anti-racist geography, is the establishment of the Race, Culture and Equality Working Group (RACE) in 2015, supported by the RGS-IBG. RACE has sought to improve the representation of ethnically minoritized scholars in the discipline and develop pedagogical skills to support anti-racist learning and teaching. It has also contributed workshops around decolonizing teaching and research in geography (Esson and Last, 2020). Agha et al.’s (2024) commentary on Gaza pursues this initiative, offering scholarly tools and resources for decolonizing. The traction gained by decolonial initiatives in Australia, Canada, South Africa and beyond intimate that the hegemonic status and ‘business as usual’ approach of Anglo-American geography is coming under scrutiny.

It is abundantly clear that geopolitical social movements on American and European university campuses such as Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall and Freedom for Palestine are giving momentum to a long-awaited anti-racist decolonial ‘turn’. This has spotlighted issues including institutional racism, neoliberal practices of whiteness, the paucity of Black professors, or desires to decolonize the curriculum from the ground up. Student activism is key to identifying injustices, such as campus memorials to imperialists and slave-owning benefactors, university investments in the arms trade, or opposing Apartheid. If Anglo-American geographers are serious about decolonizing, some unsettling questions are needed about school and university curricula, student recruitment and diversity, the reliance on international student fees and the practices of staff hires and career progression, as institutions lay claim to global elitism. Although the journey towards ‘becoming decolonizing’ will take careful navigating, institutional changes and the experimental pedagogical roadmaps canvassed here, offer innovative routes that take us beyond the cul-de-sac of modernist colonial geography, mapping new geographical imaginaries (Agha et al., 2024; Country et al., 2016; Daigle and Sundberg, 2017; Jazeel et al., 2022). Such anti-racist decolonial initiatives open up possibilities for living, thinking and doing geography, ‘otherwise’.