Black Geographies/Ecologies
Documentary work across six field schools, three years, multiple collaborations in one unfolding story.
WHAT THIS WORK IS
Black geographies and Black ecologies are ways of understanding how Black communities relate to land, water, and environment as people who shape, survive, and remake the places they live in. From plantation soil to coastal flooding to toxic industry — and ask what Black communities have always known about the land that mainstream science and policy have ignored.
Black communities across the U.S. South and the greater African diaspora are often the first to experience the brunt of climate change — food apartheid, polluted water, and air. But they are also the ones who have generated knowledge about how to read, respond to, and survive those changes for generations. Black ecologies names that knowledge and treats it as real evidence, not folklore.
This way of thinking also shows something simpler but just as important: race is written into the landscape itself. Not separate. Where are people allowed to live? What are you permitted to build? Black geographies makes these questions visible.
My role in this field is to put a camera and a microphone where the theory lives. As lead documentarian for the Black Ecologies Lab, I make films and collect oral histories that turn this scholarship into something people can see and hear — sharing the knowledge Black communities hold about their land and water before it disappears, and making it part of the public record.
