Performing Spatial Justice responds directly to the heavily mediated spectacle of violence against black bodies that is not new, but has experienced renewed attention over the past five years. While racial profiling is often discussed as a social phenomenon, it always has spatial influences and implications. The way a person’s identity is misread on a street corner differs from the misreadings that might happen in a University classroom, as do the injustices that result from these spatialized misreadings. While developing a theory of the the “space of misreading” and “black transparency”, I asked myself, how do these responsibilities, these burdens…and the associated actions, expectations and misunderstandings transform as a black body moves from one physical site of associations and misreadings to another? This project dares designers and urban planners to ask ourselves: how does the anticipation of those misreadings in space or the weight of those burdens transform the black body itself and what must we do to eradicate those misreadings?
The full thesis book can be viewed as a PDF here: Performing Spatial Justice (PDF for UPD)
Cara Michell 