Sara Smith
Biographic Data
| ID | 3633951 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sara Smith |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sara |
| FAMILY NAME | Smith |
| SIGNATURE | SMITH S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5824-5092 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 637 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1955 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Forging a Sustainable Future Together: Conversations in Black-Indigenous Ecological Solidarity
Emergent conversations at the intersection of Black and Indigenous studies are reshaping histories of Western empire by gaining more nuanced knowledges about pre-colonial Afro-Indigenous and American Indian worlds, and how the violences of slavery and colonialism upended and transformed American Indian and Afro-Indigenous relationships to land, water, and the more-than-human world. Most importantly for this conversation, these intersections are a…
What is the frontier to the migrating bird? Ladakh, education-driven migration, and the frontier as home
On stolen land, by stolen people: Engaging with legacies of land dispossession and enslavement at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
As faculty, staff, and students at a flagship public university in the US South—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—we inhabit land, infrastructure, and institutions that are foundationally entangled in Native dispossession, enslavement, and other complex processes of disenfranchisement. This article traces the experimental work of the Landback Abolition Project in asking how, through a land-as-pedagogy approach, we might enact more e…
Desirable Futures: Write Me a Letter
In this special issue, we propose the letter as a form with geographic potential. Building on prior work on letters in geography, Black feminism, and Indigenous studies, we draw on a collection of sixteen letters in the section to build a case for letters as time travel, anticolonial epistemology, feminist geographic method, and worldmaking praxis. We bring together letter writers who speak to their ancestors known and unknown, to future generati…
Relations outside of injury: Black ecologies, Indigenous geographies, and repair
The cene scene: Who gets to theorize global time and how do we center indigenous and black futurities
The Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Plantationocene are propositions for new ways of understanding the role of people on the planet. The theories hold that humans, capitalism, or the logic of plantation agriculture have so fundamentally reworked the world that we can demarcate these as new eras in the planet's history. In this article, we argue that these narratives privilege Eurocentric narratives of human history, failing to adequately engage B…
Desirable futures: Time as possibility, practice, politics
Unruly River and Plantation Logics
In this contribution to the Plantationocene forum, we ask what and how the Plantationocene allows us to see. Considering the unruly Colorado, we think through how both the delimitation of time into epochs in the form of “cenes” and the search for plantation logics might limit what we can see and understand, by excluding the unruliness of both nature and people, and by insisting on a historical vision that maintains European agency, even if render…
The work of repair: Land, Relation, and Pedagogy
Geographers center space and place in our understanding of power, arguing that relationships to place matter, that space is a result of power relations, and that how we represent the world makes the world. But to what extent do we turn these methods of analysis to understanding our relations to the land beneath our feet? We consider the experience and limits of repair across four sites, approaching land and place-making as political and cultural …
Thresholds of territory, time, and intimacy
Political geographies of discomfort feminism: Introduction to the themed intervention
What does discomfort do? What kinds of spaces, boundaries, and power relations are generated by comfort, and for whom? In this introduction to the themed section, we trace comfort/discomfort across borders and through spaces to see when and how these emotions and affective relations generate life and growth, and when they instead circumscribe possibilities. The introduction and the contributions to this issue question ‘comfort feminism’ to consid…
Youth and Decolonial Politics in a Relational Context
The lives of children and young people are conditioned in important ways by the imperial and colonial intimacies that have shaped our world. Yet, we know relatively little about how they encounter and comprehend the histories, legacies, and continuities of colonisation and racial capitalism, nor how this comes to shape their political orientations and practices. This article introduces a series of five papers that examine the everyday practices, …
Decolonisation is a Political Project: Overcoming Impasses between Indigenous Sovereignty and Abolition
In this article we seek to intervene in conversations that frame Black abolition and decolonisation as antagonistic political projects. We respond to Garba and Sorentino’s (2020) “Slavery is a metaphor”, which critiques Tuck and Yang (2012; “Decolonization is not a metaphor”) and decolonisation. Our concern is that scholarship in this vein denies Indigenous sovereignty and futurity while unnecessarily characterising decolonisation as antiblack. W…
Theorizing racialization through India’s “Mongolian Fringe”
The “Mongolian Fringe” extending from India’s Northwest Himalayas to the hill regions of the Northeast frontier, was conceptualized by British authorities as a site of geopolitical and racial anxiety given its proximity to China and Southeast Asia. Suspicion and anxiety continue to inform the relationship between the Indian state and its northern frontier territories. Drawing on a collaborative research project with college students from Ladakh i…
The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism
In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call “domestic geopolitics.” Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of …
The path you will choose won’t be a fairy tale’: Urban prefiguration and mountain Nostalgia in India’s Northwest Himalayas
Overlaid on a collage of street scenes, college students wrote: ‘Dear rest of India: Just so you know, I am a proud Indian no matter what my language is, how I look, what I wear, and where I am from’. Development narratives encourage parents to send young people from the Himalayas to major Indian cities for education. Students engage in political actions and play with their identity; simultaneously, racialized as ‘foreign’, they work out their re…
Against colonial grounds: Geography on Indigenous lands
In this response to Natalie Oswin’s provocation, ‘An other geography’, we consider how we might work against settler narratives and structures from our situated positions in the discipline and in a specific academic institution in the US South. Following Diné student Majerle Lister, we ask what it would mean to consider giving the land back: what does that entail? The academic institutions we inhabit were built to insure white futurity, on fictiv…
The politics of saving Muslim women in India: Gendered geolegality, security, and territorialization
Earth beyond repair: Race and apocalypse in collective imagination
Scholars have argued that geologic proposals for the Anthropocene are entangled with collective imaginaries and geopolitical anxieties. In this article, we analyze three prominent tropes of American apocalyptic films (the "Great Deluge," the "Nuclear Catacalysm," and "the Population Bomb") and map them onto existing geological proposals for the Anthropocene. In staging this encounter, we illustrate how impending ecological disasters in American p…
Demographic Fever Dreams: Fragile Masculinity and Population Politics in the Rise of the Global Right
In the midst of the current global turn to the right, striking resonances across oceans emerge: strongmen and their allies point to specific and vivid tales or images signaling demographic shifts as signs of danger. These could be lesbian farmers (supposedly) staging a takeover of the US Midwest, tales of virtuous headscarf-wearing women under attack by secular men (in Turkey), or of Muslim Romeos luring Hindu women to convert (in India). In each…
Cosmopolitan sidestep: University life, intimate geopolitics and the hidden costs of “Global” citizenship
In higher education in the US today, particular practices of global engagement are positioned as essential to student learning. Institutional stakeholders foreground the potential of outward‐facing orientation to the globe while sidestepping local connections to racial inequality and injustice foregrounded by student and waged‐worker activism. Faculty and student composition, course content and hierarchies of waged work have been targeted by acti…
Breaking families: Whiteness, state violence, and the alienable rights of kin
Detecting cervical precancer and reaching underscreened women by using HPV testing on self samples: Updated meta-analyses
Broken earth, shattered bones and bodies made flesh: A fragmentary and expansive Feminist Geopolitics
Reassessing the Trump presidency, one year on
Intimate Geopolitics: Religion, Marriage, and Reproductive Bodies in Leh, Ladakh
Bodies not only are territory but also make territory. Recent scholarship interrogates the utility of hierarchical scale, attends to everyday practice and geopolitical strategy, and thinks through geographies of religion in terms of intersectionality and embodiedness. I build on these developments by reading them through the lens of territory and territoriality to explore how babies and reproductive bodies are caught up in geopolitical projects a…
Race, biopolitics, and the future: Introduction to the special section
We wrote the proposal for this special issue at the beginning of 2015. From our institutional home in the United States South, daily life, class discussions, and academic work felt saturated with biopoltical questions. The year 2014 had ended with waves of protests against racialized police violence and the pervasive criminalization of Black communities and protests had coalesced around a provocative set of signifiers. The #BlackLivesMatter movem…
Earth beyond repair: Race and apocalypse in collective imagination
Scholars have argued that geologic proposals for the Anthropocene are entangled with collective imaginaries and geopolitical anxieties. In this article, we analyze three prominent tropes of American apocalyptic films (the "Great Deluge," the "Nuclear Catacalysm," and "the Population Bomb") and map them onto existing geological proposals for the Anthropocene. In staging this encounter, we illustrate how impending ecological disasters in American p…
She says herself, “I have no future”’: Love, fate and territory in Leh District, India
How and to what extent can love and desire be managed as factors in geopolitical strategy? This research expands the subject matter of geopolitical analysis and uses feminist tactics to highlight the contingent and embodied practices through which geopolitical strategies materialize in seemingly unlikely venues. In the Leh District of India's Jammu and Kashmir State, political conflict between Buddhists and Muslims has been articulated in part th…
Territory, bodies and borders
This special section builds on recent scholarship on territory and borders to call for attention to the ways that bodies are central in their constitution. Through a wide range of case studies from the delivery room to Tahrir Square, the six contributors find territory and borders in unlikely places, and reveal new lines of inquiry through their explorations of the ways that bodies both are marked by territory and borders and take an active role …
Making America great again: The fascist body politics of Donald Trump
The Diaspora Within: Himalayan Youth, Education-Driven Migration, and Future Aspirations in India
Economic change has driven parents across the Indian Himalayan Region to send their children to major Indian cities for higher education. Himalayan students' urban experience and understanding of the nation is profoundly shaped by the movement between the Himalayan context and the foreign experience of Indian city life. We draw on interviews with students to discuss their experiences in the sometimes liberating and sometimes hostile cities of Ind…
Intimacy and angst in the field
This article explores the paradoxes of angst and intimacy in 'the field.' One aim of feminist research is to attend to overlooked day-to-day practices through which difference and power work. Yet, this focus on intimate and submerged experience is also risky, potentially asking that people share their most intimate experiences with the researcher. How does such attention to the personal lives of others intersect with ethical demands and postcolon…
Against colonial grounds: Geography on Indigenous lands
In this response to Natalie Oswin’s provocation, ‘An other geography’, we consider how we might work against settler narratives and structures from our situated positions in the discipline and in a specific academic institution in the US South. Following Diné student Majerle Lister, we ask what it would mean to consider giving the land back: what does that entail? The academic institutions we inhabit were built to insure white futurity, on fictiv…
The Domestication of Geopolitics: Buddhist-Muslim Conflict and the Policing of Marriage and the Body in Ladakh, India
This paper approaches intimacy as a site of geopolitical practice. What happens when the body is the territory through which geopolitical strategies are played out? In the Leh district of India's Jammu and Kashmir state Buddhist/Muslim conflict is articulated at the site of the body and geopolitical strategies impinge on personal decisions. Over the past century religious identity has increasingly taken on political meaning in Leh, particularly s…
Intersectional feminism beyond U.S. flag hijab and pussy hats in Trump’s America
Since Trump came to power, he has undertaken a series of executive actions meant to threaten and terrorize a multitude of ‘others’: immigrants, Muslims, women, African Americans, Native Americans, transgender people. The defensively aggressive strategies of deportation, walls, and internal violence aim to define who belongs within the U.S. national territory and protect a threatened white masculinity which is portrayed as both victim and victor. …
The cene scene: Who gets to theorize global time and how do we center indigenous and black futurities
The Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Plantationocene are propositions for new ways of understanding the role of people on the planet. The theories hold that humans, capitalism, or the logic of plantation agriculture have so fundamentally reworked the world that we can demarcate these as new eras in the planet's history. In this article, we argue that these narratives privilege Eurocentric narratives of human history, failing to adequately engage B…
The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism
In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call “domestic geopolitics.” Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of …
Reassessing the Trump presidency, one year on
In the heart, there’s nothing: Unruly Youth, Generational Vertigo and Territory
Young Ladakhis have grown up along disputed borders between Pakistan and China in India’s Jammu and Kashmir State. During their lifetimes, conflict in Kashmir and in their hometowns (between the Buddhist majority and Muslim minority) has highlighted the region’s geopolitical vulnerability; in words overheard in the schoolyard and kitchen, religion is always already political and territorial. This article traces how young Muslim and Buddhist Ladak…
Decolonisation is a Political Project: Overcoming Impasses between Indigenous Sovereignty and Abolition
In this article we seek to intervene in conversations that frame Black abolition and decolonisation as antagonistic political projects. We respond to Garba and Sorentino’s (2020) “Slavery is a metaphor”, which critiques Tuck and Yang (2012; “Decolonization is not a metaphor”) and decolonisation. Our concern is that scholarship in this vein denies Indigenous sovereignty and futurity while unnecessarily characterising decolonisation as antiblack. W…
Baby bust: Towards political demography
Despite the persistence of Malthusian arguments that human population will grow to outstrip the Earth’s capacity and resources, current demography actually foretells the impending end of growth in the next half century. We are approaching a global baby bust. What does this mean for global political labor economies, regional resource economics, and local struggles over gender and power? This paper concludes, through a survey of current research, t…
Breaking families: Whiteness, state violence, and the alienable rights of kin
In the past, we ate from one plate: Memory and the border in Leh, Ladakh
The work of repair: Land, Relation, and Pedagogy
Geographers center space and place in our understanding of power, arguing that relationships to place matter, that space is a result of power relations, and that how we represent the world makes the world. But to what extent do we turn these methods of analysis to understanding our relations to the land beneath our feet? We consider the experience and limits of repair across four sites, approaching land and place-making as political and cultural …
Decolonizing the Academy: Lessons From the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is intended for graduate and professional students who desire training in carrying out research in equitable partnership with, instead of on, communities. This article, written collaboratively by five of the participants in the development of the Certificate, highlights critical practices vital to efforts toward decolonizing academic research: (a…
Politics, pleasure, and difference in the intimate city: Himalayan students remake the future
Across India, first-generation college students are flooding from rural backgrounds into Indian universities in urban settings - many facing additional challenges of ethnic, religious, regional, or linguistic minority status. Following the lives of Ladakhi youth, who travel to the city from the edge of the Tibetan plateau in India's Jammu and Kashmir State, this article traces the experience of 'the intimate city' through discussion of urban plea…
Action Figures and Men
The politics of saving Muslim women in India: Gendered geolegality, security, and territorialization
Intimate Territories and the Experimental Subject in Ladakh, India
This paper explores the management of reproduction and sexuality as experimental political practice. In Leh District of India's Jammu and Kashmir State, vote bloc politics and a tenuous geopolitical context highlight the reproductive body's potential to maintain political and territorial control through demographic trends. Conflict between the Buddhist majority and Muslim minority is articulated partly through the regulation of fertility and sexu…
The Urban South
A Handbook for Practitioners: ESL/Literacy for Adult Non-Native Speakers of English
0 I was glad to find that the Handbook for Practitioners was not just another how-to text for teachers; it is rather a compilation of materials on all aspects of Rhode Island International Institute's ESL/literacy program, including a discussion of the process that the authors went through in implementing the program. They report evenly about program successes and failures and discuss how hiring circumstances caused them to reshape the program de…
Report on the conference on philosophy and the natural environment
Action Figures and Men
The Domestication of Geopolitics: Buddhist-Muslim Conflict and the Policing of Marriage and the Body in Ladakh, India
This paper approaches intimacy as a site of geopolitical practice. What happens when the body is the territory through which geopolitical strategies are played out? In the Leh district of India's Jammu and Kashmir state Buddhist/Muslim conflict is articulated at the site of the body and geopolitical strategies impinge on personal decisions. Over the past century religious identity has increasingly taken on political meaning in Leh, particularly s…
She says herself, “I have no future”’: Love, fate and territory in Leh District, India
How and to what extent can love and desire be managed as factors in geopolitical strategy? This research expands the subject matter of geopolitical analysis and uses feminist tactics to highlight the contingent and embodied practices through which geopolitical strategies materialize in seemingly unlikely venues. In the Leh District of India's Jammu and Kashmir State, political conflict between Buddhists and Muslims has been articulated in part th…
Researching Collocations in Another Language: Multiple Interpretations
The Imahot in the Amidah: A History
Intimate others: Marriage and sexualities in India
S. Sen, R. Biswas, and N. Dhawan, Kolkata, India, School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University and Stree Publishers, 2011, 465 pp., Rs. 450 (paperback), ISBN 81-906760-1-6 Sen, Biswas, and Dhawan
In the heart, there’s nothing: Unruly Youth, Generational Vertigo and Territory
Young Ladakhis have grown up along disputed borders between Pakistan and China in India’s Jammu and Kashmir State. During their lifetimes, conflict in Kashmir and in their hometowns (between the Buddhist majority and Muslim minority) has highlighted the region’s geopolitical vulnerability; in words overheard in the schoolyard and kitchen, religion is always already political and territorial. This article traces how young Muslim and Buddhist Ladak…
Intimate Geopolitics: Religion, Marriage, and Reproductive Bodies in Leh, Ladakh
Bodies not only are territory but also make territory. Recent scholarship interrogates the utility of hierarchical scale, attends to everyday practice and geopolitical strategy, and thinks through geographies of religion in terms of intersectionality and embodiedness. I build on these developments by reading them through the lens of territory and territoriality to explore how babies and reproductive bodies are caught up in geopolitical projects a…
In the past, we ate from one plate: Memory and the border in Leh, Ladakh
Intimacy and angst in the field
This article explores the paradoxes of angst and intimacy in 'the field.' One aim of feminist research is to attend to overlooked day-to-day practices through which difference and power work. Yet, this focus on intimate and submerged experience is also risky, potentially asking that people share their most intimate experiences with the researcher. How does such attention to the personal lives of others intersect with ethical demands and postcolon…
Intimate Territories and the Experimental Subject in Ladakh, India
This paper explores the management of reproduction and sexuality as experimental political practice. In Leh District of India's Jammu and Kashmir State, vote bloc politics and a tenuous geopolitical context highlight the reproductive body's potential to maintain political and territorial control through demographic trends. Conflict between the Buddhist majority and Muslim minority is articulated partly through the regulation of fertility and sexu…
Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India
The Diaspora Within: Himalayan Youth, Education-Driven Migration, and Future Aspirations in India
Economic change has driven parents across the Indian Himalayan Region to send their children to major Indian cities for higher education. Himalayan students' urban experience and understanding of the nation is profoundly shaped by the movement between the Himalayan context and the foreign experience of Indian city life. We draw on interviews with students to discuss their experiences in the sometimes liberating and sometimes hostile cities of Ind…
Baby bust: Towards political demography
Despite the persistence of Malthusian arguments that human population will grow to outstrip the Earth’s capacity and resources, current demography actually foretells the impending end of growth in the next half century. We are approaching a global baby bust. What does this mean for global political labor economies, regional resource economics, and local struggles over gender and power? This paper concludes, through a survey of current research, t…
Territory, bodies and borders
This special section builds on recent scholarship on territory and borders to call for attention to the ways that bodies are central in their constitution. Through a wide range of case studies from the delivery room to Tahrir Square, the six contributors find territory and borders in unlikely places, and reveal new lines of inquiry through their explorations of the ways that bodies both are marked by territory and borders and take an active role …
Making America great again: The fascist body politics of Donald Trump
Gendered and Embodied Geopolitics of Borders, Marginalization, and Contingent Solidarity
When pushed to the margins and borders of the nation and state, do women produce new forms of political engagement? How does embodied life trouble borders and margins? This issue brings together cogent analyses of embodied politics and religious practice and pushes forward our understandings of the intersectional, contingent, and sometimes transformative nature of life on the margins. Nadje Al-Ali and Latif Tas write, “War is like a blanket,” cov…
Intersectional feminism beyond U.S. flag hijab and pussy hats in Trump’s America
Since Trump came to power, he has undertaken a series of executive actions meant to threaten and terrorize a multitude of ‘others’: immigrants, Muslims, women, African Americans, Native Americans, transgender people. The defensively aggressive strategies of deportation, walls, and internal violence aim to define who belongs within the U.S. national territory and protect a threatened white masculinity which is portrayed as both victim and victor. …
Race, biopolitics, and the future: Introduction to the special section
We wrote the proposal for this special issue at the beginning of 2015. From our institutional home in the United States South, daily life, class discussions, and academic work felt saturated with biopoltical questions. The year 2014 had ended with waves of protests against racialized police violence and the pervasive criminalization of Black communities and protests had coalesced around a provocative set of signifiers. The #BlackLivesMatter movem…
Politics, pleasure, and difference in the intimate city: Himalayan students remake the future
Across India, first-generation college students are flooding from rural backgrounds into Indian universities in urban settings - many facing additional challenges of ethnic, religious, regional, or linguistic minority status. Following the lives of Ladakhi youth, who travel to the city from the edge of the Tibetan plateau in India's Jammu and Kashmir State, this article traces the experience of 'the intimate city' through discussion of urban plea…
Detecting cervical precancer and reaching underscreened women by using HPV testing on self samples: Updated meta-analyses
Broken earth, shattered bones and bodies made flesh: A fragmentary and expansive Feminist Geopolitics
Sociology (37 works) · Political science (35 works) · Gender Studies (27 works) · Politics (27 works) · Law (26 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Law (21 works) · Geopolitics (13 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (12 works) · Geography (12 works)