Mark your calendars! Join us and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies for “The Material Elements of Enslaved People’s Mobility —The Way to Freedom.” This event is part of the Everyone’s Earth lecture series.
For enslaved freedom seekers near the Great Dismal Swamp, there were numerous environmental convergences that arose in areas that could have been potential sites of refuge and reconnaissance. The intersections of these paths in terms of social, political, and economic costs of escape into the wilderness is the subject of this talk. Interspecies encounters transformed into interspecies cooperation for those liberation seekers who developed a committed yearning to survive. It was The Way to Freedom.
The Way is a metaphor for the mysteries, possibilities, yearnings, and receiving of surviving turbulent terrain in search of freedom. Attendees of this talk will receive a multilayered discussion of historical Black geographies, the natural world past and present, and contemporary issues of ecological sustainability as it pertains to these elements.
Dr. Christy Hyman is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geosciences at Mississippi State University with a joint appointment in the Program of African American Studies. Her research focuses on African-American efforts toward cultural and political assertion in the southeastern United States region during the antebellum era as well as the attendant social and environmental costs of human/landscape resource exploitation. Hyman uses Geographic Information Systems to observe to what extent digital cartography can inform us of the human experience while acknowledging phenomena deriving from oppressive systems in society threatening sustainable futures. Her research seeks to provide evidence of the genealogies and practices of historically marginalized people’s navigational literacy. Relying on foundational black geographies scholarship, Hyman’s research is also theoretically rooted in black feminist theory, critical geography, geographies of transport, and landscape studies.
