On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place”

This introduction calls for political ecology to systematically engage with the ways that white supremacy shapes human relationships with land through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. To develop the analytic of abolition ecology, we begin with the articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ abolition democracy together with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s spatially attuned analytic of abolition geography. Rather than define communities by the violence they suffer, abolition ecologies call for attention to radical place‐making and the land, air and water based environments within which places are made. To that end, we suggest that an abolition ecology demands attention to the ways that coalitional land‐based politics dismantle oppressive institutions and to the promise of abolition, which Gilmore describes as making “freedom as a place”.     

Whose Streets? Roadway Protests and Weaponised Automobility

The article examines the role of automobility in US-based anti-racism demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. We contrast the spatial strategies of highway occupations by racial justice activists, with so-called “weaponised car” attacks by the American far right. Analysing online memes and anti-protest legislation, the article explores under-acknowledged links between “automobile supremacy”—the structure of motorists' privilege as embedded in law, the built environment and the popular imaginary—and the patterns of racial stratification often termed “white supremacy”. We document three ways in which automobility has been enlisted as means of violence against protestors and against wider Black communities in the US: through the use of vehicles, right-of-way conventions, and roadways as weapons. The article demonstrates how the imperative to make way for the motorist has long provided cover for racial injustice.     

New Philadelphia: using augmented reality to interpret slavery and reconstruction era historical sites

Does a historical site lose its significance or become less worthy of interpretation if there are no surviving buildings? Can technology help present the stories of disadvantaged and disenfranchised groups whose heritage lacks well-preserved architecture or material culture? The emerging technology of augmented reality (AR) offers new ways of designing and shaping the public’s experience when visiting landmarks by enabling an unprecedented means to combine 3D historical visualization with historical landmarks. This especially applies to underrepresented groups whose heritages have not been well served by traditional modes of preservation and interpretation due to a variety of factors. These range from disadvantages relating to material culture to a greater emphasis on intangible heritage which have placed them outside the bounds of what archaeologist Laurajane Smith calls authorised heritage discourse. A project at the New Philadelphia National Historic Landmark, located in Pike County Illinois, seeks to address these issues through AR. The technology, while offering opportunities for historical interpretation, poses challenges in terms of designing AR systems that coordinate content presentation with specific locations as well as developing virtual historical content with varying levels of source materials.     

Performing a different narrative: museum theater and the memory-work of producing and managing slavery heritage at southern plantation museums

In the southeastern United States, operators of plantation museums have traditionally engaged in a selective and romanticised remembrance of the antebellum past that has regrettably silenced and marginalised the historical experiences and struggles of enslaved African people. More recently, some plantation managers have sought to engage in the ‘memory-work’ using artistic practices to reconstruct and interpret slavery heritage for visitors. Our study explores museum theatre as a form of memory-work and suggests that theatrical performances of the memories of enslavement are an increasingly important but not yet fully understood strategy for recovering, embodying, and representing a different and hopefully more just narrative about enslaved Africans. We visit three plantation museums where managers hosted a theatrical performance of enslaved oral histories and explore the motivations and experiences of managers and the director of the slave performance. Realising the power and efficacy of theatrical performance as memory-work practice requires understanding how the management of the interpretation process can be difficult. We delve into the emotion-laden challenges confronting slavery-related museum theatre development at the North Carolina plantations and discuss the creative response formulated at the sites to help visitors work through unexpected feelings and understandings about the past.     

Navigating the Fault Lines: Race and Class in Philadelphia's Solidarity Economy

In debates over post‐capitalist politics, growing attention has been paid to the solidarity economy (SE), a framework that draws together diverse practices ranging from co‐ops to community gardens. Despite proponents’ commitment to inclusion, racial and class divides suffuse the SE movement. Using qualitative fieldwork and an original SE dataset, this article examines the geospatial composition of the SE within the segregated geography of Philadelphia. We find that though the SE as a whole is widely distributed across the city, it is, with the exception of community gardens, largely absent from poor neighborhoods of color. We also identify SE clusters in racially and economically diverse border areas rather than in predominantly affluent White neighborhoods. Such findings complicate claims about the SE's emancipatory potential and underscore the need for its realignment towards people of color and the poor. We conclude with examples of how the SE might more fully address racial injustice.     

Symbolic Racism,Institutional Bias,and Welfare Drug Testing Legislation: Racial Biases Matter

Since the devolution of welfare policymaking to the states after the passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, there has been contentious debate about drug testing welfare applicants. Beyond elite rhetoric and debate points about the implications of welfare drug testing, extant research remains limited insofar as providing theoretical understanding about what factors influence state proposal of legislation requiring welfare applicants to submit to drug tests. I develop and test expectations that derive from research on welfare attitudes, social construction theory, and policy design—specifically, hypotheses that the proportion of blacks on state temporary assistance for needy families caseloads, as well as state‐aggregate levels of symbolic racism, significantly influence state proposal of drug testing legislation. My multilevel analysis of every state proposal of welfare drug testing legislation from 2008 to 2014 yields strong evidence in support of these hypotheses and paints a more complete picture of the influence of racial attitudes on state welfare policymaking. Specifically, while much research finds evidence of institutional racial biases in the implementation of welfare policy, the evidence presented herein shows that these biases, as well as public biases, influence policymaking at the proposal stage. Implications of these findings are discussed in light of recent significant electoral gains made by Republicans in state legislatures.     

The Liverpool Economy during the War of American Independence, 1775–83

Much has been written about how the American War of Independence, a key imperial event, affected the British Isles. However, within this body of work there is limited reference to Liverpool, which was arguably becoming ‘the second city of empire’. This article attempts to fill this gap in the historiography, and addresses the economic impact of the war upon this key port town. It shows that there were four overall stages to Liverpool’s foreign commerce during this period—initially trade remained broadly steady, then there was a noticeable decline, the penultimate stage marked a sluggish improvement, and finally it was not until the post-war years that a sustained recovery took hold. That said, despite these overall trends, individual markets such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade often had their own dynamics. Although privateers (private ships of war) contributed towards the town’s eventual commercial recovery, this activity was by no means the only factor in explaining this rebound. Furthermore, the American war had an impact upon other sectors of the Liverpudlian economy, including shipbuilding and infrastructure projects. Combined, this evidence suggests that eighteenth-century warfare had positive and negative repercussions for the UK economy. As a result, we learn more about being ‘at home with the empire’.     

Precious work: white anti-racist pedagogies in Southern Arizona

Social justice activists come to Southern Arizona to involve themselves in humanitarian aid projects that address human rights issues emerging from border securitization processes. Over time, many of these activists connect with other social justice projects, leading to the existence of rich and dedicated networks of activists in Tucson, Southern Arizona’s largest city. Subsequently, we see the development of activist ventures orienting themselves around racial justice, through which white people work to educate other whites about white supremacist society. This paper explores the ways that white activists negotiate whiteness and privilege within Tucson’s activist networks by employing deliberately anti-racist critical pedagogies. Through excerpts from interviews and reflections on experiences as a participant observer from 2013 to 2015, I discuss the figure of the white anti-racist activist. In particular, I examine the paradoxical process of becoming anti-racist, through which white activists work to address problematic aspects of their own and others’ socialization as white subjects within the hierarchy of white supremacist society, a process that necessarily coexists with the knowledge that one cannot ‘unwhiten’ oneself, and many problematic behaviors remain.     

‘Handle with care’: literature,archaeology, slavery

This article examines the relationship between literary and bioarchaeological approaches to slavery, and investigates how the methods and priorities of each discipline might inform each other in understanding what it was like to be enslaved. Both bioarchaeologists and creative writers have attempted to access the inner lives of enslaved people, yet there has been little interaction between them. This paper offers an account of a research project which brought together a literary scholar, two archaeological scientists and seven creative writers to explore how writing might not only communicate a history understood through archaeological evidence, but could itself inform approaches to that evidence. We discuss two key themes which emerged from the project: Conversation and Caring. These themes were crucial to the interdisciplinary process, as it was only through attention to our relationships with each other that we could begin to reassess the nature of material in each of our disciplines.