On Trauma Imaginaries: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Place, and Planning

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=OUM5bzRnNVpEWGxzM21UN293MVh3Zz09