Facilitator : Farida Rady
terrain and text is a series of reading group discussions hosted by Farida Rady where we engage with various lines of geographic thought. Collectively, we traverse a range of texts bound together by a critical spatial approach. Topics include legal geographies, power and state formation, land politics and migration, urban rights and resistance, and creative praxis. Pre-reading is highly encouraged, and discussions will be casual and informal.
Tuesday, August 5, 2025
6:30pm - 8:30pm EST
Tuesday, September 2, 2025
6:00pm - 8:30pm EST
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
6:00pm - 8:30pm EST
at BAAA! (300 Campbell Ave, Unit 114)
Register through Eventbrite
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Based between Cairo, Toronto, and Abu Dhabi, Farida Rady is an artist, writer, and researcher currently pursuing a PhD in urban geography at York University. Farida explores questions of urban governance, housing justice, migrations, memory, and the poetics of place. Through various research/creation practices, including counter-mapping, alternative photography, and legal analyses, Farida prioritizes embodied and sited pedagogy and collaborative learning processes. Find Farida on a long walk, or swimming in the nearest body of water.
The first session of terrain and text focuses on chronopolitics, or the politics of time. As Helga Tawil-Souri reminds us, “time is lived, time is power, time is relative, and…time is a material struggle” (2017, p. 394). Time is a contested and contestable geography, subject to both regulation by and resistance from various actors. Please join us to discuss the ordering of time as a colonial practice, the relationships between time and space, and questions of dislocation, asynchronization, temporariness, suspension, and return. We will also discuss anticolonial understandings of time as nonlinear, simultaneous, or otherwise expansive. The texts will be emailed to registrants a few days ahead of the session, and a few printed copies will be available.
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The second session of terrain and text focuses on land as pedagogy, context, and process, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes. The word “land” is used often in geographic and spatial work, but when we use the word “land,” what do we mean? We will take a closer look at the ideological work this word does. Rather than focusing on the centrality of land dispossession to colonial projects, we will instead discuss land-based learning as a rejection of colonial education systems, as a prerequisite for Indigenous resurgence and nation-building, and as a fundamental site of transformative education for all. The texts will be emailed to registrants ahead of the session, and a few printed copies will be available.
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The third session of terrain and text focuses on abolition geography and considers “freedom as a place,” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us. We will take a closer look at the spatial and geographic applications of an abolitionist framework. What does abolition look like in practice, on the ground? Why are declarations of “innocence” counter-intuitive to the project of abolition? What do we mean when we say abolition is presence, not absence? Rather than focusing exclusively on prison abolition, we will follow Gilmore’s lead and discuss how people make freedom and imagine home against the gears of racial capitalism and imperialism on multiple scales and fronts. The text will be emailed to registrants ahead of the session, and a few printed copies will be available.