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As the most recent spectacle of state violence surrounding the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has demonstrated, anti-Blackness remains deeply entrenched in the architecture of urban governance in the United States.  More importantly, the ensuing national and global dissemination of protests against state violence—to distant places such as Dakar and Berlin, demonstrate that the dialectical relationship between anti-Blackness and the Black radical tradition remains globally resonant.  Histories of state violence across the Americas (including Brazil, the United States, Guayna, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Haiti and Jamaica) prove to be apt case studies to examine the articulations of racial capitalism and global racial regimes, and how these regimes are spatialized in the concrete locales, spanning the urban-rural divide.  This is especially so given these countries have long histories entwined with slavery and marronage, as well as their parallel contemporary forms of violent spatial confinement and rapidly growing Black social movements. 

It is against this backdrop that we invite grassroots activists and scholars for our upcoming Global Black Geographies Conference, to be held at Rutgers University, New Brunswick from October 5-6, 2023 and in New York City Oct, 7-8 2023.  These international conferece series center the topics the subfield of Black Geographieso- Prison Abolition, Black Ecologies, Black Community Economies and Memory/Resistance & the city- from a transdisciplinary and community-engaged framework. Its goal is to strengthen the global network of researchers and activists interested in Black geographies studies and activist interventions against the racialized power dynamics that perpetuates devaluation, expropriation, and marginalization of Black lives and majority-Black places. It highlights the need for urban theorists and critical scholars in general to foreground Black Studies epistemologies in their work, and in so doing, to also draw on the important contributions of social movement participants in our collective knowledge production.