Social Geography

In collaboration Spring Semester 2022

In Spring 2022, UNC Geography professor Betsy Olson attended Culture Mill’s Eclipse. Inspired, she approached Tommy and Murielle to learn more about the project, and to discover how she might bring the work into her own teaching. After weeks of conversation the three decided to build a collaboratively-taught, semester-long course that applied the practice of Eclipse to another part of the University’s campus. They called this class “Social Geography.”

The course emerged as Betsy and Culture Mill, and Eclipse Cohort member Cortland Gilliam wondered: What would it mean for Eclipse to move into the spaces of main campus? How do we force encounters with our history, and what kinds of encounters might be facilitated? When we think of Southern Futures as a path to understanding Southern pasts, what responsibilities and possibilities do we imagine? How well are we attending to these possibilities and responsibilities?

Social Geography brought together students (both undergraduate and graduate), the Eclipse Cohort, and Kathryn Wall—the Jackson Center’s Co-Director of Public History—for an experiment in true collaboration. The class took on the key challenge of social geography, which aims to extend the capacity of geographic research as a transformative force for intersectional justice. The class was held in spaces between Carolina Hall, CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio, and other spots on campus, including Gerrard Hall and the Old Well. The class culminated in a public Sound Walk around the Old Well and a facilitated listening circle practice with select community members.

Like Eclipse itself, the class focused on the bricks and masonry on campus, as well as the people who have maintained them. Members of the class helped to process existing data, and to possibly create new data, about how the campus was built by and sustained through shifting configurations of race and capital. The students conducted research in Wilson Library, processed Jackson Center oral histories of brick and stone masons, made a public website for the class, created teaching tools, and led the artists of the Eclipse Cohort in geography exercises like emotional mapping. In return, the Eclipse Cohort members shared the somatic and sonic practices they’d developed during Eclipse. Everyone in the class worked together to conduct collaborative scholarship within a broad, interdisciplinary community of people, and to explore how research and performance can disrupt the accepted histories of the landscape.