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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Join SLS as we welcome Dr. James Roane, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies, School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University and co-founder of the Black Ecologies Initiative, ASU Institute for Humanities Research. Dr. Roane's talk focuses on the 1964 North Philadelphia riot. The riot brings into focus the terrain charted in the aspirations for the city pledged by ordinary Black people. Through alternative spatial lexicons of Black social existence that tread within the territory of the illegible there are novel forms of sovereignty that emerged to express a fleeting world of capital’s disbandment, the appropriation of urban architectures and infrastructures—the underlying spatial relations and disavowals of connection rather than simply brick and cement features-- for the full expression of Black social life as opposed to the logics of flow, extraction, and legibility embedded by dominant urbanists in sidewalks, streets, row houses, and other spatial features prescribed to regulate urban sociality by taming desire, steadying market demands, and ensuring access by police. I situate the riot in the longer pre and post-Emancipation tradition of a Black counter movement against enclosure, violence, extraction, disposability, and the spatial and temporal regulation born in plantation ecologies, that I draw on Sylvia Wynter in describing through the rubric of plotting.
