 So welcome back. We are starting our fourth panel for the day titled frontiers and their politics of planning My name is Chi-an Goh, and I'm an assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and I just have to say to begin that I am honored and thrilled to be part of these Conversations, it's been a remarkable day to say the least And so thank you to Professor Hibabu Akkar, Dean Amal Andros and the whole team at Columbia GSAP for putting this together and enabling these conversations to take place So I'll say a quick note about the panel itself and then introduce our five speakers and then they will present in turn. So this panel is about frontiers in planning. Frontiers as an idea of territorial and socio-political and socio-ecological conflict and transformations Frontiers in knowledge production and co-production Frontiers in ideas about the future. So a really simple, well not so simple question How might our understanding of frontiers help us sift through the states and potentialities of planning research and practice? We will hear from five sterling scholars for this panel. First, Catherine Rankin is professor of geography and urban planning at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include gender and development, comparative market regulation, financial restructuring, planning history and theory, generally from research in South Asia. She is currently undertaking research in the areas of commercial gentrification, neighborhood-based economic development, excuse me, and post-conflict transition. Second, Nima Kudva is an associate professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University, where she is also associate dean of the faculty, a faculty affiliate of the South Asia program and a fellow of the Atkinson Center for Sustainable Future. Her research focuses on small cities and their regions and on institutional structures for equitable planning and development. Malini Ranganathan is an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University, where she serves as the interim faculty director of the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center. An urban geographer by training, her scholarship focuses on urban environmental justice in India and the United States, drawing on history, ethnography, and critical mapping to study water and sanitation, land and housing, and flooding and climate change vulnerability. Bjarn Sletto is an associate professor of community and regional planning at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on indigenous land rights, environmental and social justice, and alternative planning approaches in the United States and Latin America. He is particularly interested in the dichotomies and tensions between local knowledge and traditional environmental management systems and formal planning and management approaches. And then to Ann, Cheryl Ann Simpson is an assistant professor of geography and environmental studies at Carleton University. Her research and teaching are informed by an interest in the ways in which states and communities interact in place. Her work is focused on questions around citizenship and immigration, environmental justice, and urban health. And it reflects her interdisciplinary training centered around social planning and community development with stops in political science, biology, and geography. So we will begin with Professor Catherine Rangan, please. Okay, good afternoon. Thank you, Kian. And thank you, Eva and Laila for organizing and and really for putting me on a panel with such valued colleagues. I want to thank the panelists who have come before, who've been so inspiring and challenging and also the participants who've endured what I hope for you is the longest zoom day ever. And also I want to say hello to so many friends. So I've decided to do something a bit risky in relation to the frontiers of accumulation and dispossession and frontiers of political transformation in planning and that is to talk about my home institution of 20, more than 20 years now the University of Toronto. And I thought I'd start by recalling in relation to the panel description which mentions critical development studies, although I don't think you did, Kian. That about a decade ago I wrote a series of articles looking at the practice of planning in relation to critical development studies right and the professional practices that both critical development studies and planning theory take as their object of study, of course, you know, share a duplicitous duplicitous relationship to processes of capitalist accumulation and liberal notions of benevolent trusteeship, but critical development studies I argued then had done a better job of tracing the entanglements of projects of improvement with projects of empire. And I, and I suggested that when such theorizations about development are brought to bear on the more subtle I thought object of urban planning, then there to the flagrancies of what an annual is called liberal benevolence could be exposed and challenged. And I guess I saw critical development studies then as a kind of frontier that could push planning to challenge more forcefully the ongoing violence is at the interface of capitalism and colonialism to seek out agents of revolutionary social change and to catalyze collective critical consciousness among those engaged in kind of individual subversive practice. And so I wanted to basically start by saying, I'm feeling less optimistic these days about critical development studies as an epistemological frontier, I'm sure I'm not alone in that assessment. And I wanted to tie it to how they critical development studies have been institutionalized at U of T, along with the related tradition of area studies, before turning to what I see as the institutionalized opportunities for articulating just planning futures in planning education to pick up on a thread that daily daily initiated in the last panel. So critical development studies at U of T manifests as a as a transdisciplinary seminar series to some of to which some of you have been invited that seeks to explore development as a location for investigating uneven global power relations. It's where I catch up with friends from other departments like Tonya Lee, can be like a new John, you do beer la, who many of you know, and crucially, we are all trained in area studies right and we have a similar take on the merits of contextualized knowledges right of histories, languages, cultures, as standpoints for interpreting the world right a point that was just underscored by both Vanessa Watson and Libby Porter. So resonant with the some of the findings of a recent global planning educators interest group, or GPIG report, which argues against planning programs having international development specializations right. Some of us have been troubled by the push at our university for fast policy, fed by fast knowledge fast policy about the world, the globalization usually. So our skepticism about the role of the university and producing knowledge about globalization has also been fueled by institutionalized processes, like the trajectory beginning with renaming and absorbing of our old Center for International studies which used to house area studies and development studies into the monk school of global affairs and that is monk as in Peter monk the founder and CEO of their gold, which is the world's largest gold mining corporation. And that last year transmuted further into the monk school of global affairs and public policy. So, at the same time, as these institutionalized changes have been going on we've been growing increasingly curious about the possibilities for world in the university university to borrow from an onion's formulation. So, meaning wanting to recognize the merits of delving deeply into the histories and cultures of particular regions as we've always done, while also recognizing the imperative of post colonial and decolonial scholarship, indicating that more inclusive and accountable modes of knowledge production are needed. So we took up the possibility of developing an initiative that would expand the constituency for development studies and area studies, while also contesting the tilt toward fast policy by calling for a world in practice at U of T, right that would promote depth and relational relationality. That would decolonize knowledge and center difference so that the mantra, nothing about us without us is a guiding theme right and again a nod to Vanessa's conclusions about centering knowledge about Africa in Africa. And, and Libby's also on learning with with philosophy that comes from this place. And the third aspect of world in U of T would be to rethink transition narratives right so so much noting right that so much research and policymaking remains anchored in stubbornly linear assumptions about the way the world is headed from country to farm to factory, and that these are transition narratives that reproduce negative framings right of under development failed states informal economies and so on. So world in requires, on the contrary, identifying and communicating heterogeneous processes. Okay, so the possibilities at U of T for this kind of whirling project are enormous as they likely are at many of your institutions. Big area studies programs cross cut by traditional humanities and social sciences departments and other centers for critical knowledge, like diaspora and transnational studies the School of Cities and humanities Institute and so on. Yet the challenge is proved formidable. So our huge capacity on the conceptual front sit intention as I'm sure they do in your institutions with the uneven scattering of these capacities across differently resourced units on three campuses. Some units are well resourced and command significant geographical and political space within the university, Asian Studies, the Center for diaspora and transnational studies as it happens. Others operate on a shoestring and out of veritable broom closets. African studies, Caribbean studies. Instead of meaningful self study about the dynamics of racism in these institutional configurations and processes, we end up with little bits of turf that have to be defended and an administrative leadership oriented to suppressing rather than collaboratively exploring descent contradiction and systemic inequality and equity. So, for example, plans for a roundtable dialogue on decolonizing decolonizing the university and treaty responsibilities intended to explore what it means to live and work on treaty lands, and what opportunities we have as staff, students and faculty to meet our ongoing treaty responsibilities had to be postponed because of perceived erasures of slavery and black people's presence in Canada implied in the characterization of U of T as a community of indigenous and settler scholars. Meanwhile, racism persists within the mundane workings of traditional social science and humanities departments. So a Southeast Asian colleague in a social science department is addressed in department forums, only as a specialist in area studies with no regard to her for her contributions to theory. A Southeast Asian colleague in a humanities department is asked to cover courses on Africa, because of the department's lack of capacity in that area on the presumption that her expertise in Asia would qualify her sufficiently to address another global south geography. In politics of critical development studies and area studies, it seems are too fraught with a toxic combination of white supremacy, multiple racism, and a fractured unevenly resourced institutional landscape to engage generatively at this juncture in practices. And so I wanted to shift to say by contrast, our relatively little corner of planning within a department of geography and planning. As it turns out has proven a bit more fertile for exploring frontiers and imagining futures of political transformation this year at least. So others in our planning, like many other planning programs ours is currently conducting a wide ranging internal review, including issues concerning curriculum recruitment community relations and the review coincides with organizing by students who urged to address anti black racism and other forms of injustice in our programs and beyond in the wake of the recent waves of police police violence against black and indigenous peoples, and the historic political mobilizations of black and indigenous movements. More, more generally the review is premised on a recognition that official planning practices in Toronto transpire on colonial lands and contribute to well documented processes of racialized spatial inequality. So under such circumstances, we've sought to raise the question. How must critical planning educators respond to that to today's urgent yet contested demands for social justice. To ask myself for our purposes here today, what are some of the features of our process of program review that make me optimistic about this juncture for planning futures. What are the conditions of possibility that I see aligning right now within planning education as we know it. I, I fear that my responses might seem trivial but I do think that they add up to something important. So I'd say that first, we've hired a black professional planner, Abigail Mariah, and who's an alumna of our program and founder of two nonprofit organizations, the black planning project and the mentorship initiative for indigenous and planners of color to collaborate in our review, which is not a conventional arrangement for review of academic program. We've also hired not just student RAs to support research but also student members of the planning review committee through a competitive application process right so on the basis of their knowledge of or experience with anti black and other racism. The students job is to attend review committee meetings as members and contribute their perspectives on the materials circulated for discussion. This arrangement to was complicated to get institutional approval for as you can imagine, because of the risks of the ever present or frequently uttered risks of precedent setting. But I'm proud that my department did in the end consent and together, these processes, these kind of configurations of our committee for the review have really allowed us to examine in practical material ways, the nexus of knowledge, power and practice. So second, two of our internal review committee members, myself, and a brilliant masters student named Keisha, St. Louis, and Bernie were invited to sit on an anti black racism task force struck by the Ontario planners, Ontario professional professional planners Institute. So, OPPI is not exactly a site I would have imagined as a frontier for planning futures, having long regarded it as a conservative guild, fundamentally behold into the workings of racial capitalism, and its manifestation in private real estate. But I've been compelled by OPPI process of assembling practitioners students and faculty to find common ground in naming structures of racialized accumulation and dispossession, while also in a more resurgent vein exploring together. How to remove barriers to becoming a professional planner in order to address the lack of black representation in the profession. Yes, you're right unnecessary but not sufficient politics of presence. So how to build and share knowledge about black histories and histories of systemic anti black racism in the planning education of everyone and how to promote a more informed planning practice that recognizes diverse publics baselines of urban life to use Abdul Malik's formulation and how to better engage with black communities to address issues arising from their lived experiences. When I heard Mona and Abdul Malik talking about building public institutions capable of taking care of things this morning I felt actually so grateful right to have a new generation of OPPI practitioners as colleagues with whom to deliberate the politics of inclusion and incorporation in relation to structures of accumulation and dispossession. And I'll just end on third that this is really and this is really where I take to heart the injunctions of critical race and feminist theories to travel our institutional and epistemological homes. We and I mean faculty and students in the planning program of you at U of T have agreed that addressing anti black racism in planning education must begin with self study. We've relied on the critical skills and sensibilities of research assistants Kuni Kamizaki and Hazel Valenzuela with some consultation as well with Ferna who's been involved in similar processes at UICU to develop visual representations of our curricula and our courses and how they have changed over time. So shared platforms of knowledge in Mona's words this morning and to develop processes for collective review of individual syllabi. If I'm sound starting to sound self congratulatory. Let me tell you that what we found is not to be celebrated case so core faculty abandoning pedagogic missions of the program to focus on more current research interests, the persistence of a hegemonic canon despite attempts to introduce alternative cannons at the margin, inconsistent, inconsistent attention to questions of knowledge power and action in our most skills oriented courses, the persistence of the more the most egregious colonial models of development and some of our courses oriented to planning law and project management. And the evidence that anti black racism is too often treated as an afterthought in our courses. So all this is in a department comprised of dear trusted colleagues with whom I enjoy an apparently misguided image of our program as situated at the cutting edge of radicalism and planning. And I suppose what I find most promising about this prospect process goes back to what you all already know about collaborative modes of knowledge production informed by critical theory. In the rarefied context of North American academia that translates into the somewhat unusual situation of faculty agreeing to some form of group censorship, whereby claims for academic freedom can give away to a collective accountability to essential mission oriented to planning education for social justice. So I'll just conclude by underscoring that the imperative for a material foundation for anti black racism. You know, must, you know, be centered right before worlding projects can advance within universities, first point. And second, I just argue that we can find frontiers for political transformation and our own planning education that alternative futures do not necessarily have to to entail grand constructions but it can can include modest self study with the aim of repair. And that once we get clear about some basic common ground, then possibilities for collaboration with unlikely partners opens up. Thanks, Kim. Thank you Catherine. Thank you so much to my dear friend Hiba and to Lila for pulling off this meeting of minds. I'm so grateful to have been included. Thank you to the 20 panelists and moderators who have made this such a worthwhile event. And thank you, especially to the audience. If this is not your first panel today and you stuck through it, then I can't see you but I love you. So thank you. Please comments, which I have titled frontier lawfare and environmental on freedoms. I want to look at the interplay between particular forms of legal power and the making of environmental on freedoms in and through the frontier. So like the panelists before me. I will explore the frontier in theory and in history in terms of its real material stakes, but also the frontier as offering unfettered conceptual possibilities and here I'm particularly interested in emancipatory urban political ecologies. A long time ago, I was invited to write an essay which I titled the environment as freedom towards a do colonial reimagining. And in this essay I sought to reclaim the analytic of freedom for environmental justice struggles, whether it is lead poisoning coursing through a young person's body, or lungs strangulated by surface ozone in a neighborhood ripped through by or the sulfurous stench embedded in hair and on skin due to dehumanizing sanitation labor. I use the concept of environmental on freedoms to signify the fundamentally humanity and dignity robbing qualities of environmental injustice. Now the shift from environmental injustices to environmental on freedoms is tactical and semantic. It forces a move away from the liberal legalism that frames us centric scholarship on distributive and procedural justice. The environment as freedom is at core a re humanizing and life affirming trope. It is a political demand to interrupt the production of state sanctioned or extra legal group differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death to use Ruthie Gilmore's canonical phrasing. My use of the word freedoms and on freedoms also calls attention to how Dalit referring to untouchable laboring casts, which I'll get into today, and black literatures alike diasporic and internationalist black literatures named myriad social and ecological indignities precisely through the dialectics of freedom and on freedom. And the frontier that I'm going to be pushing today is the under recognition, indeed silence of cast in critical urban studies, and the need to reinstate it as a very key analytic, especially in the intersections between environmental on freedoms and state power. So I'm going to bring environmental on freedoms into conversation with what I'm going to be calling frontier lawfare. Writing about how legal procedure and the discourse of law and order are marshaled for violent and predatory state projects in the post colony, john and john comaroff propose the term lawfare. To define it using the case of Zimbabwe's brutal slum evictions during the Mugabe regime of the early 2000s, lawfare is quote, the resort to legal instruments to the violence inherent in the law to commit acts of political coercion, even erasure. More concisely, lawfare is where the legal and the lethal animate and inhabit each other. Additionally, for the comaroff's lawfare is not simply the exercise of violence through and justified by the law. It is also the exaggerated spectacle and enactment of the law, the courts, the barristers and colonial garb, the language of repetitions, the frontiers with their unstable hybridities, temporalities and open endedness as so many of the esteemed panelists today have written about Abdul Malik, Ananya, Hiba, Teresa and others are both the conditions of possibility and the outcomes of lawfare. As opposed to the presumed statelessness of frontiers, as Tio Balve's work in Colombia has shown, frontiers give rise to the most creative and violent expressions of state power. From the outset, frontier lawfare has always been justified and legitimized in the name of some public purpose. It was true a present day urban frontiers, as it was of colonial frontiers. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis argued that the conflict between civilizing European settlers and savage natives occurred at quote the hither edge of free land, and had the purpose of forming America as an independent free people in a democratic nation. Now Turner's repeated invocation of freedom and free land in his frontier thesis serves as a ruse, the misuse of freedom if you will, for what was in fact the violent extermination, erasure and plunder made possible by settler colonial frontier lawfare. To illustrate frontier lawfare's relationship with environmental on freedoms, that is my contribution to today's theme, I want to now turn to a story from Bangalore in southern India, where I've been conducting ethnographic and collaborative research with an anti-cast collective. In 2018, I partnered with Slum Jagatou, a Dalit investigative journalism collective based in Bangalore. Slum Jagatou meaning slum world is led by a left Dalit journalist come activist Isaac Arul Selva pictured here in his 2020 op-ed. What have we built for the people who build our cities. He what's apt me this op-ed during the pandemic. And with him and slum Jagatou involves archiving and translating forgotten and erased histories of land water ecologies in Bangalore, as well as tracing new idioms of international solidarity from a Dalit and anti-cast epistemology. For those who may not be familiar since I know this is a very international audience, the term Dalit was assigned by the Maharshtran abolitionist Jyothi Rao Phule in the late 1800s, who dedicated his book Gulamgiri meaning slavery to quote the good people of the United States in the cause of Negro slavery. But this book is not about slavery in the US. It is about slaves in India, who Phule seeks to emancipate from quote the tremors of Brahmin Peraldam, Brahmin being the name given to the most dominant land holding casts. Dalit translates to broken person, roughly speaking in Marathi. Dalits have long provided the unfree labor, the backbone of colonial and capitalist economics, serving as bonded or unfree labor and agriculture, manual scavengers, construction laborers, meat skinners and sanitation workers. Earlier today, Oran Yiftekel used the word essentialization to refer to the dehumanized laborers of Dubai. This word is key in the anti-caste literature as well. In fact, Dalits are essentialized and even racialized as polluted and criminal, relegated to the work in society that nobody else will do. Officially Dalits fall within a census category called schedule cast and schedule tribes, which accounts for about 25% of India's population. And Dalit is political, not bureaucratic. It was claimed by anti-caste movements during the first half of the 20th century, much like the term black was claimed as a libertarian identity at the same time. I'm extremely interested in the black solidarities as seen in slum jagadu's work. I hasten to add here that while scholars are busy thinking about whether decolonial is an appropriate use for things they're observing in the world. There are several of these connections that are already underway, not necessarily through the idiom of decolonization, but through perhaps more basic idioms such as freedom. So picture on the left is slum jagadu's April 2018 newsletter commemorating Ambedkar Jayanthi or the birthday of Dr. Br. Ambedkar, India's foremost Dalit civil rights activist and author of the Constitution. Now inside this 2018 issue is a story of Marielle Franco, the Afro-Brazilian queer feminist and socialist who organized for favela rights of the urban periphery and was murdered in extrajudicial cold blood just the month before in March 2018. It turns out by two former police officers. Exactly what her political activism sought to call attention to. These two pictures side by side because it looks as if they are looking at each other and a kind of workers of the world unite moment. This is the South-South cooperation that does not often show up in hegemonic planning radars. These transnational solidarities are neither coincidental nor random. When Ambedkar wrote to Dubois in 1946 asking him to share the National Alliance for the Advancement of Colored People's Petition to the UN, the NAACP. He introduced himself as, quote, a student of the Negro problem, working in the cause of, quote, securing liberty to the oppressed people. With this gesture, Ambedkar laid the groundwork for Dalit Black Solidarities, later witnessed in the Dalit Liberation Party, the Dalit Panthers naming itself after the Black Panthers in the 1970s. So I bring these two cases up because often when we think about the reference for Blackness, we think about North America. Especially in terms of anti-colonial struggles for academics that are situated within North America, but it's particularly important to see that Black diasporic struggles have also been key reference. So both, you know, located in Brazil as well as of course the United States for some of the types of activism and grassroots formations that we see in global South cities. So returning to the contemporary moment, one of Slumjagatou's most high-profile battles involved the eviction of 5,000 Dalits in 2013, most of whom were sanitation laborers from a slum called Yejipura to make way for malls and apartment buildings as well as a resettlement housing colony for economically weaker sections or EWS at the peri-urban frontier. Slumjagatou refers to this eviction as a blatant case of costist land grab in which the city is being recreated as the traditional village with uppercasts living in the center and untouchables or Dalits living on the far frontiers or fringes. So while we talk about how the village is being urbanized, this is actually the ruralization of the urban in terms of traditional strictures as seen from Dalit standpoint epistemology. The legal status of the land in question is complex and has not been documented but for Slumjagatou's work. Over 50 years, the land in question outlined here on this map in green has passed from a village commons to a officially designated slum to a public-private partnership in the 2000s with a real estate developer, Maverick Holdings Private Limited, the CEO of whom is Uday Garudachar, a politician of the Hindu Nationalist BJP Party. The partnership was negotiated at one of the state's famed global investor meets in the early 2000s. As cities rapidly transform through fast-tracked capitalist political economy, who tells the story of their erased land-water ecologies asks historian Devjani Bhattacharya, writing on Kolkata, When I visited the site in February 2018, I snapped his jarring picture. In the background is the fence guarding the property with the sign PPP Project of BBMP, the Bangalore Government, Maverick Holdings Private Limited Bangalore. In the foreground is an image of Ambedkar in his iconic blue suit plastered on a tin shed. The retroactive designation of the area from a recognized slum to an encroachment brings to mind Gautam Ban's work on public interest law in Delhi, which uses the figure of the encroacher to dehumanize personhood. Here now is the expelled ballot expelled through lawfare at the frontier, now inhabiting the margins of this private property. In terms of environmental unfreedoms, there are multiple intersectional across land, labor, ecology. For those lucky enough to get resettlement housing, they currently lack water, sanitation and transit networks at the far frontiers of the city. And they face additional risks of dengue fever in a poorly drained environment. For those who could not prove long-term residency, they were reduced to pavement dwelling near the eviction site. According to a doctor who had been caring for the evicted, women in particular are suffering from sexual violence and a lack of health care, even as they continue to face criminalization and stigma. Bombay-based photographer Javed Iqbal captured the violence of that eviction that day through a series of photographs titled, The Afterlives of Structural Violence. What I really appreciate about Iqbal's collection is that he focuses not gratuitously on the violence of that day, the student belonging, the detritus of crushed buildings, the anguish and desperation of the evicties, but he captures the heavily police nature of the incident. So in this photograph, you can see the kind of artillery that is on top of the police truck, which looks like a combination of water blasters as well as video cameras that is meant to control riots. And in the foreground, of course, you see male police officers and with their very large mustachioed faces and mustaches are preeminent symbols of South Indian masculinity. But there were also female police officers deployed that day. And it turns out that by capturing the presence of police, this turned out to be a very important demonstration of the practice of lawfare that day. The police treated us like criminals and denied us food, water and medicine, said Manjula, a Dalit woman evicted that day, in effect finding mission by the Housing and Land Rights Network. They talk about laws. When we don't follow traffic rules, they impose a fine on us. If that is the case, why is the law not applied when we as citizens are being thrown out in the streets? They are chasing us like thieves at Ajanta. As the politically ecologist Yafa True Love has argued, environmental harms have gone hand in hand with the criminalization of personhood to serve certain state agendas. Given the larger context of right wing Hindutva nationalism, which have criminalized and lynched beef eating Dalits and Muslims, state agendas suture together, planning with ethno nationalism to produce dispossession and environmental unfreedoms. But there's a really important recursive aspect to this relationship to environmental concerns and logics such as flooding and climate resilience are often in turn stitched together with lawfare and planning procedures to produce further criminalization and environmental unfreedoms. So I'd like to conclude with a quote from abolitionist Mariam Kaba, who says, quote, we live not just in the era of mass incarceration, but also of mass criminalization. This sentiment comes from Kaba's organizing against the prison industrial complex and efforts to undo the criminalization of black women, trans and youth populations. While Kaba's work is rooted in the United States, we need to reckon with the fact that what I have referred to here as frontier lawfare and the criminalization and unfreedoms, whether social or ecological, are global phenomena. In my work on abolitionist climate justice in Washington DC, I have similarly sought to show the concurrence of over policing toxicity and climate risk in landscapes gutted by segregation, renewal, the war on drugs evictions and austerity frontier lawfare American style. So I'll end by posing three provocations since that is the word of the day to to the panel and the audience. The first is how is planning complicit in frontier lawfare and I think we've been answering this all day. And in fact, the work of critical planning is to is to answer this. The second and this is the provocation I pose in conceptual terms. In the frontier in urban theory, if you will, how can cast sharpen critical urban analyses of land, labor and environmental freedoms, and in particular in cast contrapuntal relationship with race. Third, what would a decolonized relationship between frontier and freedom look like. Thank you. Thank you, Melanie. I have yarn slato yarn. And good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm very pleased to be here and thank you so much for your invitation. And Hiba, this has been this has been a really great, great gathering and I wish I had had more opportunity to participate today has been been a particularly difficult day with with some distraction, and I look forward to seeing all the recordings. And hello to friends and colleagues and it's great to be in the same panel as very esteemed authors whose work I have long admired. I will go ahead and share my screen and and get started. I was very intrigued by by Hiba's invitation to think about the frontier and because the kind of work I do is very much about border crossings in the epistemological and ontological ways right and and often I work in areas that are commonly considered to be on the margins to be on the on the edges of the modern and informal cities. So I was very interested in in thinking through this theme. And I, I started to think about it as, again, the first thought that comes to mind of course is the is the epistemological element of the frontier as a as a as a means of thinking through co production, which has been a central theme today and is central to what I do. But I think what I want to do is talk about three other ways of thinking about the frontier, metaphorically to see if I can get to a new way of thinking about core production for for myself. And then of course, the first thing that comes to mind is the thinking about the frontier as a margin, right so we are. I'm often told that I'm working in a marginalized community and as places on the edge, a margin that's outer boundaries are the edge. And of course that brings to mind the structural context of the places where where many of us work the so called marginalized communities are discursively and materially maintained on the edge of push to the edge. So, so from from this way of reading the concept of the frontier then it becomes a space of violence of invasion dispossession neglect and containment. I would like to think about this little differently because this way of thinking about the frontier is as the margin feeds into the planning and development agenda, and serves to rationalize interventionist planning, and development because the production of the margin is also the production of the center. And the normalization of the center. And of course in in my own position, as it would in the center at the institution like University of Texas I need to be very cognizant of my own embodiment in this kind of work that I do. So, what I like to do is is think about the frontier materially. I like to think about how the epistemological and ontological border crossings that you're engaged with when you do co productive work are situated situated in material landscapes and symbolic landscapes. I thinking it's important and worthwhile to think about how co productions are situated in frontiers that are indeed grounded in places in materiality and live practices, and not shaped by the meanings that are given to such places and things. So I refer to this as the fencing of the of the frontier to capture this materiality the frontier in terms of the of enclosure and rejection, but also the ways in which fences can indeed be declined that can be crossed right. So the third theme then would be to think of the frontier as a metaphorically as through planting of a plant planning is the critical pedagogical right conceptually in the frontier as a space of imagination. And it's a that makes me think of the frontier as a borderline right it's a borderland is constituted both through material practices that we are all engaged in this in this frontiers, but also through the structural relations that produce the frontier. And what I'm hoping to do is to center knowledge production within these borderlines within these borderlands and thinking about epistemological crossings and ways that are reflexive and self aware and are situated in the social and material relations in place, and to think through how this might constitute the source of radical action. So in the few minutes that I have today I want to bring you to two sites, the frontiers as it were, or I've been working over the years. First, Venezuela, where I've been not going to go into great depth here but I like to talk about the material space in indigenous communities. And, of course, how these have been fenced in in circumscribed and by by boundaries are violently enforced that and then how these boundaries are also being reconceptualized and interpreted, and maybe transformed into into radical possibilities of action. In the case of the Dominican Republic. I'm be talking about a community that is named Los Fatanitos that is materially and discursively marginalized and it's been. It's constructed as an urban frontier and therefore it becomes this space of the planning dreams right. It's also a place where residents engaged in co productions in these epistemological border ends, and in ways that might point toward possibilities for radical action. So, I'll jump to the Venezuela story very briefly, and about border boundaries and containment here. I've been working in area in eastern Venezuela, independent on territory in Grand Savannah, and in the territory of the area. And, as you can see, these are indeed located on the on the political frontiers as well as symbolically in the natural resource frontier of Venezuela. These are communities in the in the Grand Savannah there are many of them very isolated, some of which are are more quote developed and are located on highways. It's a landscape that are that is produced through crossings through the abilities of the Pemón. And in the perihá, it's a landscape of rugged mountains that is simultaneously constructed as the as the land of Yucca. And it's a metaphorical border land that is also material in the sense that the Yucca were formerly based in the lowlands around Lake Maracaibo and have been pushed violently to this periphery. And what's happening now is that these people you find these remote more remote communities are indeed crossing the fences that are actually reclaiming land on the ranches that are located in the lowlands, crossing the metaphorical and material fences and producing an indigenous speciality in these areas. It's a very fraught, fraught space and contested space. I was invited to these to participate in mapping project, because they're mapping projects in these two places over the years. And there's a lot to be said about the way in which participate in mapping is done at sort of beyond the scope of the talk today but these are projects driven by indigenous communities to develop maps to comply with indigenous law with the regulations for achieving indigenous territoriality. It consists of a number of mapping workshops and in a number of communities and producing maps to take many different forms, such as this in the right to Pui in the Grand Savanna and this is in the Grand Savanna. And resulting in maps that comply with the with interests of Timon and Yucpa and with the state priorities and regulations as well. So, I'm not going to go into that in great detail but I wanted to share a few comments that were made during this mapping project to sort of to just try to tease out some of the forms of co-production that happens in this epistemological borderland. So here is Javier Peniaranda, who says the following he says about the before the map was very dark and he's referring to the state maps of the Periha. The map only said Periha, it didn't exist. It didn't exist, you know, we didn't exist but now it's all here. Now everyone will know that we live in the Sierra de Periha. So, what Javier is doing here is he's clearly articulating the erasure of indigenous land and indigenous practices that has been intrinsic to the frontier making on the part of the colonial and the Venezuelan state. And it demonstrates how marginalization has been affected through state cartography, but he's using the metaphor of darkness to refer of the invisibilization as such a central technique of cartography and frontier making. But he is the same time he is articulating the possibility of the co-production that's occurring in these epistemological borderlands that were constituted by this mapping project. And this is, this is a quote from Rafael in the Gran Sabana, who says the following he says you young people don't know anything he says you're speaking to the community and to a number of young people gathered. He says you don't know anything you because those do you know are we the grandfathers, but you don't. This is because the grandfathers have been moving back and forth from one place to the next, because of this we know everything up their corners. After we do all this, all who come after us will know we'll see all the places the rivers the hills, we need to put down everything because in the future, believe spaces open people might take them from us. So, so what he's doing here, I would say is, is similar to how he is saying is, he's suggesting that maps are a tool to bring visibility and I should say, very much on their own terms to the Pemmon production of space. He also articulates two other points that I think are important. One, one is the understanding that the frontier is a material. This landscape is material it's produced and understood through the body through the movement of the grandfathers. And he articulates a very important hypothesis in this statement that that empty spaces on the state map must be filled in for these maps to do their work in their in their territorial claims. So he so so I would say maybe one way of thinking about this through the Borderlands concept is that that Borderlands is constituted by this mapping project prompts Raphael to give voice to his agency in a way that constitutes a call for action. So, briefly, the Dominican Republic. This is a, as I mentioned, it's an informal community, known as Los Platanitos. And located in Santa Rominga North, the municipality of Santa Rominga North in the metropolitan area of Santa Romingo. And it's a community that was founded in the 1990s on top of the landfill in the very steep canyon and has grown into a community of about 2000 people. And not no time to go into a great detail about the material practices here but wanted to focus on one element of community life here that has to do with the plant production in the community. And it's a form of plant production in this community take many very different forms and is characterized by very creative uses of space materials, and it's intrinsic to security and to public health and medicine, medicinal uses. What we've been doing over over the years has been working with the community as they develop a composting project here and then working with my students over the years. And we've seen information of a woman's group called Mujeres Unidas, that is managing this amazing space in the community, and also sees its expression through murals that signify the role of women in this project. So, I wanted to just conclude by sharing a few quotes from from people who are involved in this project, so I got to know over the years, right. So, Lydia and Anna Julia are talking about the emotional attachments to plant production right so Lydia says I like growing plants because every time I look at a plant I see the nature of God. Anna Julia says I grow plants out of love. So, I would say in these testimonies, they are making clear that the plants are material markers of these urban urban margins that were lost but then just find itself. But they're also embracing the relationship with the material landscape and placing it as a different than this than the residents in the area what they call the area above the formal or developed city, which is characterized by hard hardness by concrete and other hard surfaces. Santa says playfully and that you need to sing to the words. And that is also laying claim to another form of production in the community. And Alicia concludes by saying after the project with the worms we get together more we look for new options for taking care of the community. We the women are prepared for this. So she is calculating the how this new spaces as produced is composed composting site and a new social organization leads to this vision for a new form of economic production in the community. And that again is taking place in the cosmological borderless. So thank you so much for this opportunity to talk about the frontier hope I didn't go over time. And again, thank you for opportunity. Thank you beyond know that was this perfectly on time. So, our final panelists for this session is Cheryl and Simpson, Cheryl and Hi everyone. Wow. I, being the headliner for today just feels like a bit much frankly, but I'm honored to be the headliner for the day. I also want to say, you know, I think obviously a huge thank you as well to the organizers. And I think, like everyone else I, it's sort of amazing in some ways that we can all kind of be together in this way. But I think it's also important to acknowledge that being together in this way as part of a different global event. That's a little bit less amazing and a little bit less great. And I'll also just be honest to that as part of that other global event I'm, I'm just exhausted right now, even though it's been lovely learning from everyone today. I'm exhausted, you know, from over a year of kind of constant worry and panic about all the folks that I care about. I'm exhausted from the sort of sudden visibility of blackness everywhere. And all of the new expertise that's popped up around the topic and all the ways that people want to share about the topic all the time. I'm exhausted from constant work. And I'm also exhausted from thinking about all of the morning that's been done in this past year and all the morning that's been done alone in this past year. Having said that, I also recognize that I am in a better place than a lot of people in a better place than most maybe. And probably a lot of us are in a better place than most, especially for those of us that work in academia. We have been able to continue our work for the most part at a distance. And now a lot of us actually find ourselves on the sort of fast track to list for vaccination on top of everything else. What I'm going to do before I get started is to hopefully, yeah, okay, it's just to share a list of organizations, coalitions groups and cooperatives and collaborative that are doing the hard work, even in the pandemic that I just kind of talk and theorize about. So if you're paid more than a living wage and your income hasn't been impacted by the pandemic, or if you're independently wealthy, I want to encourage you to get out your wallets and to make an investment in one of these organizations, or to a group in your community that's doing similar work. And I mean this for real, right now, not a joke, not a metaphor, not sort of like a provocation, really, go get your purse, go get your wallet, go get your pocketbook, your credit card, your phone, and send one of these organizations or another organization some money. And then go ahead and put that donation in the chat or in the Q&A and tell us what the org is, or the orgs, or tell us what the orgs and how much it is, whatever you feel comfortable with. But for real, like actually go do this. This is being recorded. You're not going to miss anything when you go get your wallet or when you, you know, as you're going to get your wallet or as you're looking up donation pages, you're not going to miss anything. This is being recorded. Okay, so while you're doing that, and again, for real, you're on your computer, you're at home, you can do this right now. I'll go ahead and talk a little bit about planning and frontiers. So there are two things that come to mind when I think of the frontier. So there's two things that I think of when I think about the frontier. And one of the first ones is as the edge of empire, or maybe even really as like the vanguard of empire. There's this place that's celebrated in its role in dispossession, and in the imposition of another rule of law on a landscape with its own law, its own in a, in a gonna go and on, or a certain way of acting or acting on as I've been learning in the past, and it's important to remember that frontiers aren't static or landscapes of the past. Instead, they're cyclically in placing an ideal of constant growth through extraction and following Deborah McGregor and Laurel Toledo taking and that growth that taking that extraction needs to be constantly fed. So he finished teaching Richard Ben Camp's Windigo War Stories. And in an interview he described so when to go as quote, a being that is always starving. The more it eats the hungrier it becomes and the more it drinks the thirst here it becomes, and I kind of wonder frontiers are a bit of a win to go. All the structures that help to produce and reproduce the frontier are also constantly being reinvented from exclusionary zoning to Negro removal suburban development immigration policies, ongoing cycles of indigenous land dispossession smart cities investment in the police at the same time as disinvestment in acts of care. All of these are attempts to nourish and satiate frontiers, frontiers which are always hungry and always thirsty. So the second thing that comes to mind is Gloria and Zaldua's marvelous Borderlands La Frontera. And she defines the borderland by saying that it's that quote, borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe to distinguish us from them. A borderland is divided line. A narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It's a constant state of transition. The prohibited and the forbidden are its inhabitants. And then talking about the idea of dwelling in the borderland, she describes quote, it's not a comfortable territory to live in this place of contradictions, hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape. However, there have been compensations, she says, certain joys. Living on the borders and in the margins, keeping intact ones shifting and multiple identities and integrity is like trying to swim in a new element and alien element. There's an exhilaration in being a participant in the further evolution of humankind. And yes, the alien element has become familiar, she says. Never comfortable. Not with society's clamor to uphold the old to rejoin the flock to go with the herd. No, not comfortable, but home. So the borderland as an open wound, a space of conflict, and also language, music, movies, food, desire of the neither here nor there is a step towards living sin frontier without borders. So working for justice in and through planning is I think a bit like living in the borderlands. It means continuing to riff off of Anzaldua, knowing that you're not a community member that planning will see your claims for justice as a betrayal, and that you can't deny your membership in an institution in the institution of frontier planning. But there are joys to living sin frontier us to living as a crossroads. So outside of planning practices specifically I've discussed similar generative not quite here their spatial practices as liminal citizenship practices, and I think we can also draw sort of more broadly and thinking about scholarship and research. And we can draw on folks like Stuart Hall, and his engagement with ideas around the dialectic and coding and decoding. And we can also think about Victoria Lawson's work around care in research that claims to be radical. So I think those are some other ideas that kind of blend with this idea of the borderland and the idea of sort of sticking with the not quite here, not quite here or thereness of the borderland. So what does this all mean in terms of my own research practice, and also my engagement with quote collective decision making a fabulous definition of planning that I recently heard. So for me first a refusal, an idea that I've learned the most about in the context of planning from Heather Dorias's work. A refusal to fuel the cottage industry of report after report after report after report after report after report, aiming to prove the harm that folks being harmed have already identified and explained to us. Take an example, the idea of using GIS and spatial analysis and environmental health studies, where the limitations of our tools mean that we often can't actually register what communities are experiencing. But where our data is used to disprove community knowledge, and to feel one more study feel one more committee feel one more panel. And also taking a cue from the Third World Women's Alliance and their idea of triple jeopardy and red nation and their red deal, moving away from initiatives for quote unquote, inclusion diversity or reconciliation, that don't explicitly address taking perpetual growth and extraction, but don't address the need for redistribution and a decommodification of resources, including land, or that are explicitly or implicitly grounded in a divide and conquer narrative. For example, walking away anytime someone uses a phrase we don't want to get involved in the politics of when talking about a development deal, or anytime anyone uses a phrase but we have to be objective talking about anything that has to do with planning. Investing whatever resources I have in understanding the structures that maintain harm and impede or obfuscate actions of care transformation thriving and liberation. For example, I'm picking narratives of citizenship and belonging that functionally exclude the communities and importantly the imaginaries of the communities that are most impacted by collective decision making. Or the disrupt the strength and functioning of counter institutions to borrow in a distorted way for Michael Warner. And also teaching justice with joy. So refusal of the narrative that the harms caused by others are the defining characteristics of our communities. And always keeping in mind that students from our communities, don't travel the road of education alone for better or for worse. And thinking as a crossroads, supporting incorporating and amplifying the work organizing theorizing language imaginaries and narratives of groups organizations and institutions producing in real ways. Both their own in our in all of our liberation and thriving. In the editorial for the special edition titled planning beyond mass incarceration that I co edited with Justin steel and a DD meta. We talk about the real as being bodily, spiritual and material. So since the work I want to support is real. My support has to be as well, including importantly, always asking, who am I working for, who am I working with, and importantly, who is my work accountable to. So thinking about the real accountability and specifically materiality and redistribution, even in the smallest way. One more time. Send those coins along and let us know about it as well. So right now, that's how I would describe the borderland where I'm finding home. And I'll go ahead and just leave off with all the shout outs that I mentioned during the, this quick talk. Thanks so much. Thank you Cheryl and indeed I think a perfect keynote. Headliner headliner and liner. That's it. So, again, thank you to all the panelists beyond had to leave. So he's not here with us anymore. And we have a few minutes for discussion there are a couple of questions in the Q&A, but I would like to just start and offer some time for any of the panelists on this panel to respond to each other. There were some provocations made assertions and and just, you know, really compelling stories. And yeah, with anyone like to to comment. Can I feel like you have something that you're thinking about. I mean, of course I have something like a back pocket thing but like, I mean, so but feel free like I think part of it is to encourage some interaction here. Like one of the things I was thinking and really this is in observing and learning from so many of the panelists across the day today, that you know, on the agenda and like we so many of us I think are we we want to insist on the importance of difference, and to highlight and learn from particularities. And we're in many ways not to say all generally speaking but but but many of us are distrustful of grand theories. But in so many of the presentations I see a kind of like a parallel look at how these particularities do they may not travel but they may be observable in very parallel formats in other places. So in each place we look for these ground up making of collectivities, we look for the transversalities the kinds of like building alternate spatial imaginaries from different provisional places. And I'm wondering in some ways like we might say like no to the grand theories but are we in some ways creating a new mode of grand theorizing in that that you know if I being like a grand theorist I might I might make some parallel categories and say like we're seeing a lot of the same, the same conflicts the same, the same, the same remapping the same attempts at remapping the same some some scholars who are taking very similar strategies in order to unearth those kinds of conflicts and conversations. Is that part of a new grant theorizing. I'll start perhaps can and I can see where you're going with that question and I think you're suggesting I mean sort of like the panelists did before is that when you know there are terminology that we seek to stretch and apply across context. I think the word that Vanessa Watson used earlier in the day was leapfrogging right. So what are the dangers in that it do we then succumb to a kind of flattening right without looking at the key place based differences. And I can see where you're going with that question but I think the speakers on this panel and throughout the day have really spoken to, you know what it means to pay attention to particular idioms that that that you hear and that are in use and that have an attraction, but also the question Cheryl and was asking the end, you know, who are we accountable to right and and who are working with and so, and if we keep that question at the forefront of our research agendas that I think, you know, so, so many of the speakers kind of spoke to say who are we accountable to and who are we working with right that then that flattening cannot is prevented from happening because you know we have to we have to to seek and we have to to honor, you know the particular nuances and commitments that that that are that are in circulation and so, so I would say I guess my short answer to your question is is is I don't think that there were pushing for another grand theory in these new Libertary idioms or these Libertary, you know frames that we're proposing precisely if I would say if and when we are accountable to you. Yeah, and I just, I just jump in to say, and thanks mommy me that I'm not so troubled by, I mean I don't share your caution so much about grand theory, if it's examined in a relational way right which is, I hope what we've been doing here all day but that you you take knowledge did differently situated knowledge as a basis for rethinking issues of global concern or, you know, traveling ideas and concepts like capitalism and patriarchy so I mean I think the the goal from my point of view is to continually refine trouble develop grand narratives in relation to context specific experience and knowledge right and and that planning as well situated to do that. Thank you. So I think I will bring up a couple of the questions that are in the Q&A now one which is by Maria Teresa Vasquez Castillo who is restating a question from the morning but it is quite relevant to this one. Can you elaborate on the impacts of the new waves of displacement and dispositions in the global south that are taking place due to climate change and new global criminal activities, which in turn are reformulating the global distribution of space and land both rural and urban and closing new planning challenges and ways of recolonization and not decolonization. And I think if I if I would call on anyone I would call in Malini here. Thank you Maria so much for your question and can perhaps you would like to weigh in actually on this question as well. But, you know, you point out a really important trend, which is that not just is, you know, the physicality of climate change is we're seeing the really, you know, dire rising seas, interacting with embedded and historically constructed vulnerabilities, right, leading to displacement, you know, and entire islands, of course, being uprooted, but also the ways in which climate change resilience discourse is being deployed in the service and this is what I was trying to get at the the iterative relationship between environmental on freedoms, you know, and, and dispositions in environmental logics are often used, you know, to perpetuate or to legitimize, right to legitimize these projects of slumber removal and you see them happening, perhaps most particularly in places like the Philippines right so they're they're very, very prone to months and flooding right because of the archipelago, you know, South Pacific location and and and when when those happen and then there's flooding right the next thing that happens the state comes in and will clear out all the slums on the Pacific River. So there's this kind of real sort of climate urbanism as some of my friends in the political ecology were caught that, you know, is quite brutal and extreme in the ways it responds and so I absolutely would agree to you with you that this is something that as politically colleges we have to be attentive to. Thank you Malini and I'll just add yeah in the sites that I see I see that I work in I see very much the same dynamics that Maria is talking about here, and it brings to mind that we needed to pay attention to what Cheryl and was saying that you know to to refuse when we have you know invocations of things like climate threats and such being posed as a necessary reason to put in place particular plans and to deny politics or say no let's not bring the politics and we have sea level rise projections for instance. So that's, again, I think, just centers that need to to to maintain, maintain that kind of view of the world. And I will move to so there's a question by Peter Marqueuse. And so this, I believe it was brought up during Neema's talk, when you talked about drawing and with with plans and like planning diagrams. I'm not sure if anyone of you is working on this but I think it's an interesting question. Is there any attention being paid to the function of drawing possibly the most important boundaries in the US today around the congressional districts for the next 10 years. And Peter states that you know these lines are being redrawn not with any particularly well formed planning view of the world, even with his dark side sides considered, but really on a focus on on on political affiliations. I don't have an answer for Peter, because I don't know who's doing the redrawing of political boundaries in America with gerrymandering it would seem that it's like, you know, it's it's a decision that takes place in in in a forum that perhaps planners aren't even part of. But I don't know anything about it. I can't respond. What I do think that's interesting that your question raises for me is how salient planning even is it any of these conversations. It came up in one of the mornings, you know, one of the questions in the morning we of course as planners think we're quite at the center of so many of these conversations. But, you know, I'm not so sure we are. And if you work in India, as I do or Malini does, we're not. And if you look at the numbers of planners that get generated out of, you know, Indian schools and what they're doing. Or what happens with and who does these plans. It's it's we're not in the conversation. We're not at the center of it. We're not anywhere in it most of the time. And so I think that's a real issue right to think about. And so do we then. So I think there's one one really important realm of scholarship, which is what Malini pointed out. And as many of us do is study the outcomes of this lack of planning, or whatever form of planning we have. And then there's the other way we sort of, you know, there's many other realms, of course, but you know, some of us study this, the planning or the lack thereof itself. I should have land pointed out. And so I do think I do think there are many questions that maybe we attack academically, which in practice planners have no finger in. And I think that discrepancy to me is something that's really important for us to take on and really understand. So I'll stop there. So maybe I can take that Catherine, did you ask you something? I did. But if you want to continue with your thought, that's also fine. Well, I think I think this may this is just very much in line with it. So Scott Campbell has some comments and a question so today's speakers, I imagine, like beyond this panel, they speak of an ambitious, creative, expansive set of ideas and political transformations. Social theory, social movements, and our imaginations may know few boundaries, but the professionally oriented discipline of planning may have real constraints that limit this work within our professional boundaries. How much of this transformative postcolonial work can happen within planning? And how much do we need to promote outside of planning? Oh wait, I just lost a question. Okay, how much do we need to promote outside the confines of planning? There may be inherent limits to the ability of urban planning to be the most effective arena to promote this work. Catherine. Yeah, that actually connects well to the previous question by Peter, the answer to which I'm also mostly ignorant of, but it did remind me that in the connection that we, I'm having with the provincial planning institute that registers planning programs and individual planners. One of the, one of these such such an encouraging development in this moment that that I'm seeing with them is that they are genuinely taking another look at what they call the competencies or planning practice against which both planning programs are evaluated and individual planners have to, you know, demonstrate their competencies. And it occurred to us as we were talking about our own program and trying to think about, you're trying to stretch beyond these guild based competencies that I think Scott's question is also, you know, rooted in the framework for reminding us of that there's a bunch of kinds of actions that I think we as planning educators would like to claim as planning competencies like political organizing right you need to organize politically to change those jurisdictional boundaries or to to refuse the changes that are being promoted and I guess it's Georgia right. Georgia and Alabama I'm not sure but anyways, so what are the planning, like the social planning skills that are rooted in. And there's another question by Tom and Gotti about community engagement right that are recruiting in specifying. What are the needed sort of social justice oriented organizing popular education kind of oriented skills that planners need in order to be effective Neema in the kinds of debates that maybe planning is marginalized from because of that, what you know that blind site that what do you call it blind spot in competencies. Does that make sense. So I would just say two things quickly I think the first thing is that like, I mean planning as a formal field is about 100 years old, it's not very old. And so the idea that there is like this long tradition of what planning is and how it has to be done. Which is, it's not really factually true right what planning has been and what planners have done has changed a great deal in that 100 years as well. And so I think that idea of like limiting our imaginations and our imaginaries in terms of like what practicing public planners can and can't do. Um, it makes sense, right, because we are constrained in the systems that we're in, but it's also kind of like it's a bit of a cop out in another way. I think the other thing is, you know, reflecting on you know both Neyman and Catherine's ideas around planning is pedagogy. I've actually never taught in a planning program I you know right now I'm teaching undergrads and environmental studies, and a little bit in geography and so you know I do teach a planning class in that context but my, my assumption is not mostly people are going to become professional public planners or consultants but they're going to become elite citizens because all of us teach people that are going to become elite citizens. You know me right that question around, you know, gerrymandering for example, what are our elite, what do our elite citizens know about how their own systems work right how their own political systems work how their own systems of, again, you know, thinking about what the way that nation defines planning as collaborative decision making what do they know about how the systems of collaborative decision making work. What do they know about the land that they're standing on right like so again like that idea of pedagogy I think that both Catherine and Neyman brought up feels really important in the context of these questions. Thank you. And so I want to leave like some minutes at the end for closing comments so I'll just air two related questions and maybe take one answer. The first by Anna Maria Leon, who says that, quote, I've seen change specific to curriculum. This is actually quite related to the current conversation. I've seen change stopped in different ways. For instance, with arguments for faculty independence in quotes excellence in quotes we don't see color, and even the kind of you know like misled mobilization of intersectionality quotes, my course addresses class so I don't need to address race. Do you have any strategies or advice to circumvent or resist these racist arguments against change in institutional settings. So that's the first question and then the second one which is by Shafali Latina. So, who has been reflecting on Sarah Ahmed's critical reading of institutionalized diversity. Ahmed shows us how the institutionalization of diversity can lead to include inclusion and complaint as token, but seldom leads to equity and transformation. So open question, how can we approach diversity as ethic method and outcome. And I think we'll have one response to that. Catherine are you going, you want me to go one person can. Well, it goes up. Neema go ahead and then Catherine. Shafali, thank you for that. I do think Sarah Ahmed's works really, you know, quite, quite central right to thinking through some of these questions and I think the danger of tokenism is very real. I mean, Cheryl Anne sort of called us on it right. So thank you for that Cheryl Anne. And I think that's, you know, the tokenism piece is very, very real. And so the struggle always becomes in my mind is to design these institutions or our institutions, the practices within our institutions, such that they remain unsettled. And that's the challenge, right? How do you embed a piece? How do you, how do you, how do you design a practice such that every time you make a decision, you have to actually think as opposed to just sliding into a mode of just doing it without thinking, right? And so I think, I think that's, that's the method piece is to force the thinking. And if you, if we consistently force the thinking and we think about this, you know, the part that, that both Catherine and I have been talking about is planning as pedagogy. And the institution itself embraces that kind of thinking. Maybe we'll have some shifts and some changes. So I think that's one answer. But thank you for that. And then Ana Maria, you know, the way the American Academy is constructed, the content of a course is not subject to anybody's, anybody's touch unless the course is owned by the faculty. And so I think one of the shifts that we've been starting to make is to talk about how the core does not belong to one faculty member. That the core belongs to a group of faculty. And if it belongs to the group, then that group has to be having a conversation. So again, unsettle that question of who things belong to. And if they belong to some, you know, a group that's larger than whatever that disciplinary canon wants to define. I think it opens up the question of the curriculum. So I'll just stop there. Well, just to agree with Nima, I was going to say almost the same thing and her talk actually made the same point. I would just add that the core belongs to the faculty and must be held accountable. And she talks about a collective mission, right? And she talked, she talked, she chronicled that production of that collective mission. So that I think that's the recipe that kind of takes those arguments because of the mandate for accountability to a collective mission, then those arguments are, you know, really dissipate. I find that colleagues when, and what we've done actually UT is to, I like the way you say that, you know, whose property is the course and also the course has responsibility to articulate how it relates to the mission. Then, you know, everything is framed in relation to this collective articulation and But, but you know, the Kathy that that kind of formulation and I mean I'm listening to share land who said, um, I don't know, she'll be interested to hear what you think about this, you know, is their accountability. If if we convert sort of the ownership of the core to a kind of a collective right does that does that accountability then change the relationship of those who held a certain kind of expertise from their interest from their studies or does it. Do this displacement function that you were so critical of. Yeah, I mean I think there's two ways to think about it I think I think the idea of, you know, the faculty owning the core. I think it works when the faculty is all accountable in a similar way. So if there is an agreement right if there has been the work that's been done the relationships that have been built. I think then even that the conflict over that maybe becomes a little bit lessened. I think the trying to think how to say this, I think the flip side though is exactly what you pointed out, you know that like. Again, right this the sort of idea of Borderlands right that there's, there's contestation but there's also opportunity. So I was nodding along when you said that there's nobody checking your syllabus because there's nobody checking your syllabus. And so if there isn't that that same accountability across the faculty. I'm not like the faculty is not my first, my first port of accountability. So, you know, my syllabus. My syllabus does things that my colleagues would not do. True. But if you want the core to do stuff. You know, but here's, but here's how I do that I teach, I teach core classes. Like I volunteered to teach core classes that nobody else wants to teach. And, you know, but I'm quite happy to teach them because it means that every student that comes through our program has now been affected by the the whims of my capabilities. But Sharon, then it's not I'm not saying it's an end point. Yeah, it's not a good point. Yeah, because then you land up doing a lot of work. Well, but again, right, I get, but there's choice and there's so much choice in the work. Right. So, yeah, I don't have, I mean, so I teach a core class, but that also means I don't have to do any grading because I got six TAs. Boom. Right. So, you know, I mean, there's there's so much there's choice in terms of what that work is right so. Malini. This question and I'm already asked clearly has touched a nerve, because you know I'm also in the thick of it I teach it in the national affairs school. So, you know, the iconic epistemology is post Cold War, Eurocentric international relations, right and and and faculty, white male faculty have the audacity to say things like why does race and anti racism matter to the can I mean to the completely erasing the history of black internationalism, you know, in the founding of the one of the major journals internationalism. So it's incredibly white and discipline. But here are my quick pieces of advice so I love what Cheryl and said about teaching core classes, absolutely teach classes that maximum students flock to right, which is what I do and I, and I teach it in that insurgent way, you know, against the but but you know also helping them in this process of unlearning I think unlearning is as important as learning and I've often said that the second is don't wait till tenure. People tell you wait till tenure I keep your head down. It's total bullshit. Right and I've learned this from mentors. Don't wait to tenure because you're not going to be politically spineless before tenure you also give me that after tenure. Third coalition and alliance building is amazing. I think many people know you know, like know this kind of advice they get they get it right. Coalition and alliance building is key we can't bring everyone along. I don't want to bring I don't want to waste my energy and trying to convince people, you know, I have far better things to do. The university that most of us works and retains a white supremacist core, but we can find allies and we can organize with them. That's what we're doing. So can I just add one thing and I agree with Malini. If you're political now, it, you know, having tenure and not having tenure doesn't make any goddamn difference. And so you know, do what you want to do now. So I totally agree with you on that question. It is a lot of work, though. And so, you know, be aware of that as well. And so that's even if you have 60 years, it's still a lot of work. And so I do think thinking about that is important. You know, there's one piece of it. Just one thing, just one thing quickly to say, though, what you're doing is a lot of work as well. And I think exactly what Melanie just pointed out is bringing people along who don't want to work to me. That's a lot of work and it's work that I don't want to do. So I think about what Melanie is saying, right, is it's like, it's a diversity of tactics at the end of the day. And I have taught in the core from the first day I came to Cornell throughout and I still teach in the core in and I do the other stuff. So I mean, so when you have once you have tenure, maybe you can do things a little differently. So but that's one piece of it. The other piece of it is something that Tommy and Gotti, I think there's some earlier conversation that's been going on. I missed part of the day today on community engaged work, right? And I do want to bring that up because it's not just, I mean, our core curriculum is really critical. It's important and there's ways in which our classrooms like, you know, Bell Hooks so usefully reminds us are these radical spaces, right? Of possibility. But how we engage with communities and the ethics of our research ethics when we start talking about this question of decentralizing, decolonizing how we engage. I don't think we're paying enough attention to that. I don't think we're talking enough about it. I don't think we are thinking enough about it. And then where does this question of, you know, what Catherine and I are talking about of planning as pedagogy begin to come in in these conversations of community engagement. And so that's the other really important piece that I don't hear. I mean, you hear the anthropologist talking a lot about it, right? And I don't hear us talking enough about it. I think some of us do, but not in the ways in which we are culpable. Our institutions are culpable for the sorts of relationships, you know, we're working through and working out. And then how we really teach that in planning practice and in workshops because of course, you know, formal planning, especially in the United States. I mean, go to California can't do a thing without community agreement, right? And so I think that's a piece of it that I'd like to leave us all with in terms of thinking about that other piece of the pedagogy puzzle. Thank you. I love it. This is just like crazy cool stuff here. So thank you all, panelists for taking part. And really, this could go on for a bit. But I am going to bring back the fearless conceptualizer and convener for the day, Professor Hibabu Aker. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much. Oh, I was like behind the screen cheering on you. Thank you so much. Thank you for the fearless panel. Thank you for the fellas. So thank you for for igniting the fire here for all of us. Thank you for this panel. Thank you for for all the speakers who spoke today and for the moderators. So it has been a long, wonderful long zoom day and thank you for the 90 something people are still with us. I also want to thank all the 20 speakers and moderators for keeping for keeping for keeping us on fire today and for like really providing a lot of food for thought. I also want to reiterate my thanks to my co-moderators for Kango for Dalio and Dal and Sai Balakrishnan for actually supporting me on this day today and for being amazing. I mean, our littlest woman in planning group has been like a really amazing support in the past couple of years. So I'm thankful for today. Thank you for the privilege of your friendship and your support and collaborations. Thank you so much. I also, it has been heart heartening to see the engage and wonderful questions and the generative dialogue dialogue along since 930 am here, New York time. So we are able to continue these conversations in many forms and formats. And my biggest hope is that I'm going to get to meet all of you in person, hopefully in post covered world where where we'll be able to go back and and actually shake each other and have a drink afterwards and invite all the audience to come with us. And I also want to thank again Laila Ketelyar for her brilliance for her support. And I want to thank Mayev, who is behind the AV today and this link, the recording for this event will be up on YouTube for people who weren't able to be here for the day or you want to go to some of the panels. Thank you everyone. Thank you speakers. Thank you panelists. Thank you moderators. Thank you audience. And until we meet again, please stay safe and hopefully we'll emerge in a better world soon. Thank you.