Cancellation of the 8th Institute for the Geographies of Justice

March 23, 2020

We, the organizing team, announce the cancellation of Institute for the Geographies of Justice (IGJ) 2020. We do so with great sadness. The organizational infrastructures and alliances that underpin IGJ 2020 have been built through many, many months of dreaming and working together across the Antipode Foundation, the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and La Hidra Cooperativa. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the contributions of La Hidra Cooperativa, including Melissa Garcia-Lamarca and Mauro Castro who have generously and tirelessly provided vision and sustenance for the institute. We also recognize the labor of our keynote speakers who committed to this endeavor and many participants who applied to the institute.

We had held out hope that there would enough stability by mid-June in order for us to convene IGJ 2020. That hope was less about maintaining academic normalcy and more about the urgent need for housing justice movements to deepen alliances in order to build the world that must follow in the wake of this crisis. While holding any type of significant event in mid-June is now out of reach, the urgent need to advance housing justice through transnational alliances has only become more urgent. It is also clear to us that the neoliberal university is incapable of nurturing the forms of mutual aid and solidarity that are necessary in such catastrophic times; all around us, the masquerade of academic normalcy is exacerbating the lived inequalities of academic life and widening the already vast distance between academia and communities on the frontlines of struggle. The imperative for a shared terrain of movement-based and university-based scholarship that drove the formation of the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities Network and this particular IGJ is also much needed. Put simply, there is much for each of us to do and I hope we can find ways of sharing and connecting that work.

Mauro Castro, Melissa Garcia-Lamarca, Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, Andy Kent, Marisa Lemorande, Ananya Roy