Black Planetary Studies (BPS)

Background

By harnessing the long history of the Institute for Social and Health Science’s (ISHS) community-engaged research and practice, the research agenda of the CoE for Black Planetary Studies adopts a black onto-epistemological and ethico-political frame to knowledge that centres black ways of knowing, living, and creating. The research agenda brings together black studies and planetary studies in the service of breaking ontological boundaries to redraw spatio-temporal parameters, recast the human in relation to natural ecologies, and to think across species in ways that attend to relation and co-constitutedness. We respond to the need to think beyond the limitations of the Anthropocene. This centres place, the interface between the human, oceans and other waterbodies, spiritual and ancestral cosmologies, plant and animal ecologies in our multispecies world, and black solidarities across geographies. By focusing on the oceanic, we stake a claim in marine studies by reading the ocean in relation to its multi-species lifeworlds which include and exceed the human. We align our interventions to the national and international movement for environmental justice. This CoE will be a hub of knowledge creation and dissemination to the multiple publics that constitute the ecosystem of an engaged university.

Aims

The CoE will address interconnected planetary challenges comprising climate and resource crisis, species losses, deepening oppressions, understanding relations and consititutedness of species, solidarities, and our mutual futures. Our aim is to secure our mutual futures with much more expansive planetary horizons than we have hitherto considered. BPS taps into marine studies to understand how black communities live with(out) and alongside water, oceanic histories, livelihoods on the water, water cosmologies and ritual, water quality, and struggles for water.

The aims of the CoE for Black Planetary Studies are to:

• Illuminate what comes to view when we read the complex ecologies of the multispecies planet by departing from the tradition of centering the human at the expense of the natural world.
• To read water masses such as oceans, rivers, dams, and marshlands to understand climatic challenges and opportunities invested in securing our mutual futures.
• Understand how residents of informal communities live in relation to their natural ecologies.
• To read landscapes to illuminate deep planetary histories where multispecies pasts are equally considered.
• To foster critical solidarities with oppressed communities both locally and in the black diaspora by seeing the human in relation to the exploited multispecies world.
• To fashion freedom from systemic deadly forces such as climate change, racial capitalism, and the plunder of our natural world.

Four project niches animate the CoE scholarly agenda:

Oceanic Life and Histories on the Shoreline:

Since multiple species, including the human, have a stake in the ocean (e.g. livelihoods, recreation, trade, propagation, regeneration), this project expands marine studies beyond the natural sciences. We think with the social issues animating the shoreline including oceanic cosmologies, water rituals and spirits, land reclamation from the ocean and desalination efforts in this iteration of water scarcity, flooding and broader climate change and environmental justice.

Black Cartographies of the South:

This programme is constituted of three potential foci which include: Black place naming and place making in informal settlements; black spiritual cosmologies in the outdoors; and thinking along rivers and wetlands.

Critical Solidarities:

Here we grapple with the theoretical and practical stakes of building and nurturing critical solidarities and struggles across global south communities.

Assembling Archive and Memory:

This programme convenes a thinking community to imagine how we might constitute black archives across space. This invites rethinking what constitutes archives and how we might knit deep black histories of worldmaking into this imagination. We also attend to existing community archives to animate knowledge making and epistemic freedom beyond university spaces.