Colonial Debris, Decolonial Horizons – Black Geographic Interventions

Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye (Lecturer in Black Geographies), Emily Burgess (fourth-year student in Sustainable Development and Human Geography), and Hugo Edgoose (fourth-year student in Human Geography and Social Anthropology) explore site-specific interventions grounded in Black Geographies as creative and critical place-based responses to the University of Edinburgh’s legacies of plantation enslavement and empire.

Their work takes place at the University of Edinburgh's Institute of Geography, a building imbued with history. This building was formerly a surgical hospital extension of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, which claimed ownership to Red Hill Pen and generations of enslaved people in Jamaica, and benefited from plantation profits. Today, the building’s walls uphold displays connected to this and wider histories, including maps, busts, and a University commemorative plaque honoring Mungo Park. Victoria’s Black Geographies teaching and research centres these spatial histories and presences, using them as points of departure to learn with interdisciplinary Black thought and to experiment in intervening in these place-based histories and legacies through spatial practices grounded in Black methodologies.

Image: Drummond Building and Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (RIE) Gates.

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