On Trauma Imaginaries: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Place, and Planning
2023-02-14 15:30 - 16:30 (Africa/Johannesburg)
Join ACC as we host an online seminar by Jocelyn Poe, Visiting Assistant Professor and Provost Faculty Fellow at Cornell University, entitled On Trauma Imaginaries: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Place, and Planning, on Tuesday, 14 February at 15:30.
Please note: Due to student action on the UCT campus, this event has been moved online.
ABSTRACT
Working as a practicing planner in primarily black communities, I noticed a pattern of visceral reactions to planning processes. This pattern exposed a psycho-socio-cultural phenomenon that aligned with the characteristics of trauma. While planning theory has long acknowledged the profession’s role in producing racialised spatial realities, few have explored how place-based trauma shape places, spatial processes, and spatial imaginaries. To fill this gap, I analyse my experience in practice through autoethnography, and then, I assess the validity of this theory by exploring these concepts in South Central Los Angeles (SCLA), a place radically different from Mississippi. Through this process, I identify, describe, and conceptualise this phenomenon as trauma imaginaries, the intersection of spatial imaginaries and communal trauma. In doing so, I developed a theory of communal trauma to understand how places hurt and how this hurt impacts spatial processes. I found that trauma was preventing places from achieving healthy growth and collective well-being, and this trauma was directly linked to historical injustices.
BIO
Jocelyn Poe, Ph.D. is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Provost Faculty Fellow at Cornell University, while also practicing as a certified planner with the American Planning Association. Her research engages mixed and remixed qualitative methodologies to explore how place, planning, and well-being intersect to spatialize injustice and inequity. Using her experiences as a practitioner in Jackson, Mississippi, she builds theory on communal trauma and trauma imaginaries to describe and understand a psycho-socio-cultural phenomenon happening in place and impacting planning processes. This trauma work informs an approach to a reparative praxis that can help planners achieve social justice and equity outcomes in historically underserved communities.
RESPONDENT | Nisa Mammon, Adjunct Professor, African Centre for Cities and Managing Director and Principal Planner, NM & Associates Planners and Designers
WHEN | Tuesday, 14 February 2023
TIME | 15:30-16:30
VENUE | Due to student action on the UCT campus, this event has been moved online.
ZOOM LINK | https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87507483039?pwd=[REDACTED]
