Unsettling Race, Nature, and Environment in Geography

Abstract

What might it mean to “unsettle” our disciplinary understanding of race, nature, and the environment? In this introduction to the 2023 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers—focused on Race, Nature, and the Environment—we reflect on the meaning and practice of unsettling in a time of climate crisis, toxic legacies, uneven development, state violence, mass extinctions, carceral logics, and racial injustices that shape—and are shaped by—the (re)production of nature. We note the ascendancy of critical scholarship on race and racialization in Anglo-American geography; its uneven diffusion and unmet challenges; and the unstoppable force of insurgent thinking, abolition geography, critical race theory, Black and Indigenous geographies, scholar activism, and environmental justice praxis in taking hold and transforming the discipline. The sixteen articles in this special issue embody different ways to “unsettle” disciplinary thought across the vibrant fields of political ecology and human–environment geography. We discuss how the articles collectively grapple with timely questions of land, water, territory, and place-making; render visible the spatial and socioecological reproduction of power and violence by capital and the state; and make space for the enduring politics of struggle on multiple registers—body, home, classroom, park, city, community, region, and world.