Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations

In this article, researchers from an academic institution and researchers from a community-based organization theorize a recent collaboration. This “contingent collaboration” was designed to analyze interviews that had been conducted by the community organization and required the purposeful negotiation of two thresholds, one methodological, the other empirical. Writing together across diverse experiences with academic research, the authors consider the implications of the settler colonial roots of social science, the voyeuristic tendencies of academic researchers, and the historical presence of Black people as “other” in the academy for academic-community research partnerships.