On April 20, LaToya Eaves, Menakka and Essel Bailey ’66 Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University, delivered the 2023 Peter Gould Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Department of Geography.
Eaves studies Black feminist geographies, placing them largely in the U.S. south. This interdisciplinary field seeks to understand how the experiences and perspectives of Black women shape and are shaped by the built environment, landscape, and social structures.
In Eaves’ study of Southern history, questions of racial, gendered, and environmental justice are posed alongside the historic pursuit of equity by Black women. Her current book project highlights the work of women like Septima Poinsette Clark, who, she says, are “under-acknowledged producers of geographic knowledge.”
During the 1960s civil rights movement, Clark was fired from her rural teaching job because she was a member of the NAACP. But she continued to educate the Black community, and she built her own “citizen education” schools designed to empower the Black vote.
“By 1970, over 20,000 African Americans had gone to citizenship schools,” says Eaves. “They provided an education that empowered grassroots people, typically African American women, so they might become leading citizens in their own communities.”
In addition to Clark, Eaves recognizes several other stand-out Black feminist figures, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, and Anna Julia Cooper.
“The field of feminist geography has interrogated the politics of domination and the positioning of space, place, and landscape,” Eaves says. Through her scholarship, she attempts to synthesize four decades of resulting literature, alongside six decades of history on geography and race and two centuries of Black feminist thinking in the United States.
“Reorienting common understandings of the histories of inequality, oppression, exploitation, and white supremacy in the U.S. South reveals deep and long legacies of Black feminist activism and praxis,” she says.
The Peter Gould Memorial Lecture Series was established more than 20 years ago to honor the work of geographer Peter Gould ’56, whose research on spatial analysis and mental maps began at 51.