Haunting Interruptions: Race, Infrastructural Violence, and Spatial Memory in Ferguson, Missouri
On Thursday, November 13th from 12:00-1:15pm, join the Sociology Department together with the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES), The Black Geographies Lab, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and History in the Rachel Carson College Red Room, to welcome speaker Rashad Timmons (UC PPFP) for a discussion on Race, Infrastructural Violence, and Spatial Memory in Ferguson, Missouri moderated by Camilla Hawthorne (UC Santa Cruz).
This presentation engages the racial politics of infrastructural violence and spatial memory in Ferguson, Missouri—the historically-white suburb of St. Louis and site of the tragic police killing of Black, 18-year-old Michael Brown, Jr. in August 2014. It critically examines the use of blockades, space-based protests, and other forms of infrastructural disruption by Black subjects in Ferguson before and after Michael Brown Jr.’s execution, paying specific attention to the mnemonic work these practices perform. It argues that Black subjects in Ferguson deploy these tactics of spatial intervention not only to claim space in Ferguson’s suburban landscape but to haunt its collective memory. These disruptive practices—what I call “haunting interruptions”—disturb or interfere with the normative function of infrastructures such as roads and highways to reveal, indict, and account for the historical racist logics underlying (sub)urban life. The presentation grounds haunting interruptions in an examination of historical and contemporary protests in the notorious apartment complex where Michael Brown Jr. perished and finds that Black subjects use protest and blockage as spatial tactics not simply to force state, institutional, or corporate entities to act but to surface the memory of persistent racial suffering that exceeds reparation and is acutely sedimented in the suburban geography.
Rashad Arman Timmons (he/him) is a community builder, musician, writer, scholar, and educator from Detroit, Michigan, the ancestral and present homelands of the Anishinaabeg. The proud son of factory workers, he teaches and writes broadly about race, urban infrastructure, mobility, and power in the midwestern United States, es Black people’s longstanding use of the built environment to imagine a freer and more just world. Rashad earned his Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where he researched the violent and racist history of infrastructural development (e.g., railways, roads, telecommunications) and policing in Ferguson, Missouri. Rashad is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where he is writing a book about the plunder and persistence of Black geographies in Ferguson.
Alongside his scholarly work, Rashad serves and organizes with the Michael Brown Sr. Chosen for Change Organization to uplift the life and legacy of Michael “Mike Mike” Brown Jr. In this role, Rashad leads public history and community engagement projects dedicated to uncovering and preserving Black history in Ferguson and St. Louis. He also writes grants to support the Brown family’s healing and racial justice efforts throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area. As lead grant writer, Rashad has secured more than a half a million dollars of direct funding to the family’s non-profit organization.
Rashad currently lives in Oakland, California—the unceded lands of the Lisjan Ohlone—where he delivers political education to Bay Area youth and supports organizations working to end police terrorism in the U.S. and abroad.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) together with The Black Geographies Lab, the Sociology Department, Critical Race and Ethic Studies, and History.
