Richa Nagar, Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota, will deliver the Keynote Address for the 20th Annual Critical Geography Conference, to be held February 21-23. Nagar's lecture will be on Friday, February 21, at 4:00 p.m. in Atlas 100.
Nagar's work focuses on the politics and practices of knowledge production in an interconnected world marked by deep inequalities and violence. Her work engages questions of epistemology and ethics, praxis and solidarity, to explore how alliances for sociopolitical justice are created and maintained. She has previously developed this work through her contribution to Playing with Fire, a collaboratively produced book created by the Sangtin Writers Collective in Sitapur, India.
Her keynote will draw from her forthcoming book, Muddying the Waters: Co-authoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism. That book builds on her ongoing work in Sitapur by placing it in conversation with related struggles in sites as diverse as university classrooms in the US and the streets of the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam. Throughout, she considers the labor and politics of translation across multiple borders that are often difficult to cross, exploring the prospects for collective action in terms of radical vulnerability. Resisting the romance of border-crossing, Nagar offers an embodied account of how these efforts succeed and fail with far-reaching implications for feminist praxis.