Celebrating Black Geographers: Spotlight on Alex A. Moulton

Alex A. Moulton is an assistant professor of geography and environmental science at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), and a member of the faculty in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program and the Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies program at the Graduate School and University Center of CUNY. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, he has undertaken research in Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Grenada. He has a BSc in geography and geology at the University of the West Indies, Mona, a M.S. geography from East Carolina University, and completed his PhD in geography from Clark University.

His research examines Black geographies, ecological justice, community resource governance, landscape legacies of colonization, and political ecology of environmental change. He is the co-editor of forthcoming volume titled Political Ecologies of Futurity: Storytelling Plantation Afterlives, Climate Erasures, and Socioecological Justice (Bloomsbury) and another on Robert Wedderburn, an 18th century British-Jamaican radical and abolitionist (Broadview Press). His work has been published in academic journals such as ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies; Environmental Humanities; EPD: Society and Space; EPE: Nature and Space; Geography Compass, Sociology Compass and numerous edited volumes.

I identify as a geographer because I embrace the idea that geography is fundamentally concerned with making sense of people’s place in the world. In the sense that, I am interested in how people locate themselves in all manner of spatial, societal, and environmental relations. And in the sense that I am interested in understanding the patterns emerging from and related to the ways people make a place for themselves, individually and collectively. As important for me is the way geography offers a way to scrutinize how social relations mediate people’s position, or place in relationships of power, in ways that are spatially meaningful or discernible. All of that turns on notion of a geographical imagination, that perspective or schema through which geographers conceive of and interpret space and place.

Katherine McKittrick’s “On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place.” published in Social & Cultural Geography (2011) is one of my favorite articles because of the conceptual framework it provides for examining Black spatial understanding and experiences. The article is a seminal exposition on Black place-making, the way Black life and knowledge exceed slavery, violence, and death, and imperative for new methodologies to study Black embodiment and Black futures. I also very much love Adam Bledsoe’s and Willie Jamaal Wright’s work in “The pluralities of black geographies.” Antipode (2019). That article very helpfully reminds us that Black geographies are not uniform nor singular, but richly diverse—they are polyvalent/