What is the People's Geography Project?
The major goal of the People's Geography Project is to popularize and make even more relevant and useful to ordinary people the important, critical ways of understanding the complex geographies of everyday life that geographers have and continue to develop. Our contention is that such knowledge is an important tool not just in learning to cope with constantly developing and transforming relations of power that are deeply geographical, but in learning how to actively transform those relations in the name of social and economic justice. Produce popular accounts (both written and filmed) of the social geography of the United States. The goal of these accounts is to help people understand how their lives are caught up in complex relations of power that are fundamentally geographical. Produce popular, easily understandable, and compelling accounts of contemporary, critical approaches to geographical knowledge. The goal of these accounts is to produce alternative visions of what geographical knowledge is and can be than those currently available. Develop curricula for both K-12 and college-level courses. Support young scholars, both pre- and post-doctoral, in their development of new, critical, and, eventually, popular approaches to pressing geographical problems and issues. Create active linkages with community organizations, labor unions, social movements, and so forth both to move geographical knowledge out of the academy and "into the streets" and to learn from those organizations, unions, and movements about how they actively construct and contest the geographical structures that govern their lives. Develop an institutional base (or bases) to assure not only the short-term success of the People's Geography Project, but its lasting influence in geography and public discourse more widely. |