Hi, my name is Jesse Keyset and I am really excited to be able to share a little bit more of my work with you. I'm going to start talking about research and then go a little bit into teaching at the end. My research focuses mainly on the city of Detroit and I think about the city of Detroit in two different ways. The 1st way is in the way. I kind of entered thinking about the city of Detroit. Was thinking about black grassroots planning processes. An in particular black.

Claims to land an alternate claims to land through a logic of care and I'll talk a little bit about that. And part of that was looking at black LED urban agriculture. Part of that was about has been about looking at black resistance to housing displacement and eviction defense the other way that I look at Detroit is a little bit more from a top down perspective where I'm looking at anti black racism in in a couple of different ways. One of the things I've looked at it in terms of is water shutoffs and right now I'm in the middle of.

A long book length project on gentrification and the ways that gentrification in Detroit relies on a settlor logic. I also am moving into thinking more about settler colonialism a little bit more directly. I'm really interested in its constitution with slavery, an anti black racism and I have a kind of side project but I think will turn into a more main project when I'm finished with this book which is thinking about reservation border towns I.

Currently live on our dinner reservation border town. I live in Flagstaff, AZ which is right on the border of the Navajo Nation and so I'm really interested in thinking about the ways that reservation border towns function as kind of buffer zones with that protect the rest of the country from thinking about the violence, this ongoing violence of settler colonialism.

So I started thinking about Detroit as a visionary space. Detroit is a place where there are a lot of really innovative and creative land, claiming projects and ways of sort of place making that seem outside of the norm in in capitalist societies. And I was really, really excited about the kinds of projects that were happening in Detroit, and so I approached thinking about to trade initially in very much the way that that Lisa Kay Bates Sherita Town, Christopher Paul Jordan, Ankit Solen Lily, Lot.

Approach it in this article element that happened in a couple years ago in planning theory and practice where they asked how is planning, scholars, practitioners and educators. We could develop a new spatial, imaginary one that is not merely anti colonial or anti racist but a spatial imaginary that is entirely otherwise where people are engaging in these very creative place shaping and place claiming practices.

And that's how I approached the city of Detroit. Detroit often talked about in terms of the level of land vacancy or of vacancy that there is in the in Detroit. Vacant lots. This is a map that was created by Detroit Works Project, which is the planning body of the city of Detroit and I'm talking about 40s vacant square miles in the city. I think what's less talked about is the fact that a lot of that land that's counted as vacant is in fact used, it's claimed.

By people usually in the neighborhood, and it's used often for a lot of different sort of innovative kind of purposes. Oftentimes that's urban agriculture, and there's been a lot of a lot of scholarship about urban agriculture in the city of Detroit.

And one of the things that I think is most important about that is that most of the land that's being cultivated in Detroit is land that the people who are cultivating it don't have legal title to. So there are some issues of precarity there. But then there's also these sort of interesting ways that people are claiming land through alternate logics.

An organization that I work very closely with eyes, freedom, freedom, which is also an urban agriculture project and a political project. Here you can see that they're using this vacant vacant land for a community meeting.

So through my work with them and through other urban agriculture projects in Detroit, I developed this framework of the ways that people in Detroit claim land through a logic of care. And I think of care in three different senses. So people claiming land based on care in the terms of stewardship, intending so based on like who is caring for that land, who is actually doing the labor of of taking care of that space. I think also people claim.

Land based on care in terms of emotion, affect and relationality. So people's relationships that they have with that land and on that land have people lived on that land for a long time. Do they have family? Do they have friends? Do they have long standing community relationships on that land?

And also people claiming land based on care as an evaluation of interest and what I mean by cares and evaluation of interest is like what do you care? Why do you care about this land? What do you care for and.

An the priority in Detroit. Logic of care of in terms of land claiming is on use value versus exchange value. Use value over exchange value. So there is a priority, uh, sort of community consensus priority on people who are going to be using that land for their own purposes for use for growing food, for having picnics, time for playing horseshoes on.

Over people who are going to care about that land because of exchange value.

And I think about these practices in terms of a long trajectory of the black radical tradition. Clyde Woods talks about grass black grassroots planning practices, and I think this is very much in that vein. So he says during the last 300 years the African American working class has daily constructed their vision of a non oppressive society through a variety of cultural practices, institution, building activities and social movements. By doing so, they have created an intellectual and social space in which they could discuss.

Plan and organize this new World and I think that a lot of the work that's happening in Detroit and it's a lot of it, is very sort of quotidian. But a lot of this framing of land claiming and the labor that's happening on it is very much in that vein.

My most recent project thinking about the logic of care. It's currently under review in antipode is thinking about it with.

Detroit eviction defense now Detroit eviction Defense is an organization that defends homeowners from being evicted from their homes through mortgage, foreclosure and sometimes tax foreclosure. An I was fascinated by them because they they tend to lose in the courts. They have lawyers that help homeowners through the legal process of eviction trying to fight it, but they almost always lose in the court system and it's because the ways the law is written that they tend to favor mortgage companies.

But they also tend to win in terms of keeping people in their homes, and I was trying to figure out why they did how that worked. However, they were able to have such a high success rate of keeping people in their homes even though they were losing in the courts. And what I found was that they were using a narrative strategy that was based basically on a logic of care to argue why Detroit homeowner should be able to stay in their homes. So even when they were losing in the courts and losing based on the logic of capital they were winning.

In terms of these arguments, because they were able to in a community forum, they were arguing to newspapers. For instance, they were arguing they were talking to neighbors and they were able to garner incredible community support for homeowners who were undergoing eviction processes. Which then that community support. Then, in turn, pressured mortgage companies into into negotiating with homeowners and then keeping them in their homes. So I'm writing an article about actually finished the article. It's under center review, currently in antipode.

The other research project that I'm really working on is thinking about gentrification in the city of Detroit and the ways that anti black racism is also undergirded in gentrification by logics of settler colonialism.

And I'm really interested in that in terms of narratives in mass media. In artistic production, in public discourse about the city of Detroit.

And I'm mainly interested in narrative because these narratives then in turn support public policy which accelerates displacement of both black and indigenous Detroiters and facilitates a white reoccupation of this city.

I started looking at this in terms of metaphors that were being made about the city and this is a really obvious one. This is and also a sort of horrific one. This is L Brooks Patterson. He's a politician or was a politician. He died recently in right outside of Detroit.

And and when in an interview with The New Yorker, they asked him, what do you think should be done about Detroit's economic crisis and what he said was what we're going to do is turn Detroit into an Indian Reservation, where we heard all the Indians into the city, build A fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn. Now, if you don't know Detroit very well, you might not know. But Detroit is the most predominantly black city in the United States. It's 80% black, so when he's talking about the Indians in this scenario, he's actually talking about black people.

And it's particularly genocidal metaphor because the blankets he's talking about are smallpox blankets. These are the blankets that were.

Used to as part of the strategy of genocide in the United States through southern colonialism.

But I think that this also happens in the sort of metaphor isation using seller colonial metaphors in Detroit happens a lot in a lot of different ways, and a lot of them, a little bit less glaring. This is, yes magazine. It's a leftist kind of activist magazine.

Um, where they're calling Detroit, the new American frontier.

This is Dan Izzo. He writes for Huffington Post, Go Midwest. Young entrepreneurs is kind of a riff on the go West young man boosterism kind of phrase of the Old West.

And I think it's especially striking about this is it's happening through a narrative of comeback. One of the most common narratives about Detroit right now is about Detroit coming back. And what is meant by Detroit coming back.

I think it's fascinating because this is happening, this narrative of comeback is happening in a moment in which.

In which I think we should consider almost a catastrophe for most of the people in black Detroit.

From 2000 to 2010, the city lost 1/4 of its residents. The vast majority of whom were black, and this is more population loss. Actually, in this most recent period, then occur during the period of white flight, then a curd during industrial flight in the 1970s and 80s, and most of that flight or most of that displacement was displacement. It's not flight, it's people losing their homes. So from 2005 to 2014, more than 1/3 of Detroit homes were either mortgage or tax foreclosed.

And between 2014 and 2016, the city shut off water to about 47% of the city's water accounts.

So we're talking here. A moment of of incredible crisis for many, many people in Detroit. And yet, this was a moment that was being narrated is still a moment that's being narrated as as come back. And So what does this come back? Well, who is coming back? It also is happening in a moment of black displacement, where white folks are beginning to re occupy the city in a process of gentrification. So this comeback is actually white people coming back. It's not a comeback of the city itself or a comeback for people who are in this city.

So I started thinking about this.

And started asking this question and this is kind of my entry question. Given how differently black and Indigenous people have been racialized in the United States, WHI is its most predominantly Black city so often subject to tropes and logics that directly reference settler colonialism.

Um?

And one of the basis of this questions love this question is thinking about it in terms of critical race theory, so critical race theory, one of the kind of central ideas, is that the ways that particular groups of people are racialized in the United States is largely structured by and designed to facilitate white settler goals of spatial and capitalist expansion. But it also takes different strategies according to different groups of people. So the ways that Indigenous people have been racialized in the United States have been largely along the lines of what Patrick Wolf calls a logic of elimination.

Which is to say, much of the race. The racial, many of the racial strategies that Indigenous people have been subject to have been.

Geared towards elimination, either through, for instance assimilation, forced assimilation through boarding schools for instance all the way to mass murder, organized mass murder and genocide, and the reason for that is because what white people, what white settlers wanted from indigenous people, was in sort of continues to be land and also sort of legitimate claims to land. So they wanted to not have any competing claims to the space of the United States.

Um, which leads to then a logic of elimination of not wanting Indigenous people, indigenous bodies there to be able to claim that land. This is really, really different than how black people have been racialized in the United States. Black people have largely been racialized through what City Harman calls a logic of fungibility.

Analogical fungibility is basically a logic of commodification, and there's, uh, one of the obvious ways that black bodies and black people have been commodified is through slavery, and as cheap exploitable labor. But there's also other ways in terms of white pleasure, for instance, or as a kind of trope against which to define white humanity might be another way, anyway, so there's, but in order for that project to to go on, black people actually have been required to exist, in a way.

In a way that white, or in a way that Indigenous people have been required to disappear. So it's very, very different racial logics that have been applied to black and Indigenous people.

So historian Justin Leroy asks what insights might emerge from thinking of settler colonialism as a logic of indigenous erasure that has sustained coherence partly through a language of anti blackness. And he's done some really interesting research around that.

And I'm asking kind of the converse question, which is. So using the example of Detroit, how might we view current iterations of antiblackness? So in this case black displacement, with the understanding that it has sustained its coherence partly through a logic of anti indigenous knus.

So this the book will include chapters on development narratives about Detroit Ann Black, Detroiters that drawn settlor, an anti indigenous logic and that's a little bit more would have talked about here. I also I'm really interested in looking at in the process actually writing the chapter on shifting labor markets that position black people as non workers which has long been the case for Indigenous people who have been framed as non workers. So indigent one of the sort of markers of settler colonialism is that it tends to.

Displaced people attempts to dispossess people of their land without proletarian Ising them without using them as workers, and increasingly I argue this is happening for black people as well.

And a chapter on policing as an eliminatory spatial fix.

So.

I'm not going to talk too much about the settlor Bordertown project. Although I am very very interested in talking about that in the interview. But in the future and this sort of side project I'm doing is looking at border towns to reservations in the United States as ways of containing as sort of zones that contain a lot of the visible and ongoing violence of settler colonialism, which then facilitates widespread in the rest of the United States.

Settlor, unknowing acelerar sort of oblivion about about that ongoing violence which then facilitates.

The the continued occupation of this land.

Um?

OK, so anticipated rough publications this article that's under review in antipode currently and the book on gentrification and settler colonialism in Detroit are, I think, the ones I'm working on most presently.

But I have also 2 two articles that are in the works for one article and one, and I think that this seller unknowing project will eventually turn into a book as well.

And they could all be.

Considered for Azraff publications.

OK, so teaching.

I tend to use a very place based teaching style.

I in in Northern Arizona, one of the kind of my signature projects that I have students do is something that I call people's guide to Northern Arizona and it's modeled after the University of California Press is people's guide Book series, which are, which are guidebooks to cities, but they're looking at the landscape and looking at tourist places in very, very different ways than tourism. Promotion tends to tends to examine them right, so they're looking at.

Labor strikes, they're looking basically at the place and the history of the place, insights, and the geography of places through like as a guide, right?

And so that's what I try and have students do as collectively as a class. So the project has two different two different.

Stages the first is that students critically examine the way the area is currently narrated. Northern Arizona is a tourist place. the Grand Canyon is in the same County as Flagstaff, so there's a lot of tourism advertising University promotions. We examine critically the way that the space this area is narrated.

And then students pick a site to write a guide entry about do research on that site and then write write a small blurb which we then compile together as a class into a people's guide to Northern Arizona. Students have done projects on indigenous protests of skiing on Sacred Peaks. Flagstaff is right at the base of Sacred Peak, a peak that 13 nations in the area hold sacred. And there's also a ski resort on it.

Ah, so there's lots of been lots of protests. This has been a flashpoint for many, many years. People have done projects on the loop, Japanese Internment, prison on gentrification, displacement and resistance, to that on reservation. Muralism there's a really beautiful reservation muralism movement.

And I think I would be able to do some.

Being kind of similar in Liverpool.

Some ideas about how to do place based education with the kind of research that I do would be looking at Liverpool's role in colonization and the slave trade or looking at the Toxteth riots and the legacy of that black resistance to police brutality which of course is a really live issue in this moment and I've found that a lot of students are very, very interested in thinking about police brutality and black resistance to that.

In this current moment.

So it might be a really interesting connection to make.

Otherwise, I think I could contribute to the Department. I would be very, very interested in doing a field class in Detroit in developing a field class in Detroit. I think Detroit would be an ideal field location from which to study, race and struggles over urban space. Urban financialization, an austerity, housing and housing struggles, food and food sovereignty, water struggles, diverse economies, gentrification and critical Urban Development studies, deindustrialization and shrinking cities.

There's a lot I think of really rich research possibilities for students in Detroit.

And another field class that I also would be very interested in developing would be one in Flagstaff.

I think this would be particularly interesting to do with a physical geographer because there's a lot of really interesting human geography projects that I think could be done in Flagstaff, and also a lot of really interesting physical geography projects. I think it would be an ideal field location from which to study settler colonialism and decolonization.

Digenis social movements tourism water struggles. Sacred and ancient sites and with a physical geographer. Also. As I mentioned, this is were very, very close to the Grand Canyon. It's on the Colorado Plateau and a lot of geological formations. In terms of that. Lake Powell, which is this right here, Grand staircase, Escalante Bears Ears and it's in a volcanic landscape.

I think there would be a lot of really rich possibilities there too.

I am very excited to be able to talk to you in a few days I guess. So weak, almost two weeks and I'd love to answer any questions about any of this there, and I'm very much looking forward to chatting with you further in the conversation. So thank you very much and I will see you in a couple of weeks.