CGE-SG Statement of Solidarity

The Critical Geographies of Education Specialty Group (CGE-SG) stands in solidarity with our Black colleagues and specialty group members and with the uprising against police brutality and anti-Black racism that has most recently claimed the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor in the United States to Regis Korchinski-Paquet and D'Andre Campbell in Canada. The movement for Black liberation is global and calls all of us to action. We must resist anti-Black racism at all levels where we find ourselves to have influence and power. 

CGE-SG was established to promote, organize, and advance critical geographic explorations of education and schooling; to support the scholarly growth of critical geographers of education; and to contribute to social movements related to struggles over schooling.  These struggles emerge from a national ideological project that depends on policing to maintain and reproduce the system of white supremacy. Our work examines its mechanisms: from settler colonial logics, market-based neoliberal governance, and education redlining, to the militarization of schools and everyday policing of Black children that comprise the school to prison pipeline. Our work also engages with the myriad ways that individuals and communities create space for Black futures.   

​We are grateful for the leadership of the Black Geographies specialty group in pushing the discipline forward and echo and respond to appeals articulated by other specialty groups, particularly the Specialty Groups for Indigenous Peoples, Queer and Trans Geographies, Latinx Geographies, and Caribbean Geography; we join those calling for the amplification of Black voices and the support of Black life, activism, and labor, in our discipline, in our communities, and in the streets. 

Solidarity is a responsibility. The CGE-SG is committed to meeting this responsibility by earning relationships with grassroots movements fighting for Black liberation and justice; advocating for police abolition and anti-racist education; and working through our professional and personal lives to combat anti-Black racism in all its forms.

Black lives matter. 

Signed,

​CGE-SG Officers