Racing geography into the new millennium: Studies of 'race' and North American geographies

Abstract

There appears to be a renaissance regarding questions of ‘race’ and racism within geography in general, and within North American geography in particular. While matters of ‘race’ have always been central to the practice of geographical scholarship, whether explicitly foregrounded or not, the past ten years have seen a burgeoning engagement with racialized geographies linking geographic research with issues more widely extant in social science literatures. This special issue of Social and Cultural Geography presents seven empirically focused examples of recent research on ‘race’ being undertaken in North America by geographers and others sympathetic to an analysis predicated upon a socio-spatial dynamic. While not presented as a comprehensive survey or synopsis of the broad range of geographic research on ‘race’ and racism currently underway, we hope nevertheless to contribute to the renaissance, highlighting some important research questions, themes and points of connection among geographers, as well as to researchers in cognate Želds. Very briey, then, this introduction to the collection will elaborate the immediate context or background that produced the following essays, before enumerating the salient themes to be found within their empirical speciŽcity.