Colloquium: Dr. Nik Heynen

Nik Heynen

Distinguished Research Professor

Department of Geography

University of Georgia

https://geography.uga.edu/directory/people/nik-heynen

Title: The Sweet Promise: Letters to Ms. Cornelia

In May of 2015, with her mind still on freedom and transforming the soil that her enslaved ancestors were forced to work, Cornelia Walker Bailey, a well-known Saltwater Geechee activist, writer and storyteller brought together her son Maurice, and a Professor from the University of Georgia named Nik, to help her grow numerous varieties of Gullah Geechee heritage crops in an effort to mobilize a vision for preserving her community. By summer of 2017, she, Maurice and Nik started to see her vision begin to manifest through the clearing of land, erecting of fences, installing of irrigation, planting of crops and pulling of weeds; lots of weeds. But then in September 2017, Hurricane Irma engulfed the Hogg Hummock community in a violent storm surge; the largest/most intact remaining Gullah Geechee community left in the country was under six feet of water including the initial crop of Purple Ribbon sugarcane they had grown.  As the storm waters receded and the crops dried out, a month later, Ms. Cornelia suddenly passed away. Nik, who had promised Ms. Cornelia that he would do all he could to help Maurice make her vision a reality the last time they spoke, two weeks before her passing amidst the havoc wreaked by Irma, realized that promise took on life-changing meaning in her death; it too felt like a mandate that could never be renegotiated. This epistolary-based talk will chronicle the travails, tribulations and little triumphs the Hogg Hummock community has experienced since Ms. Cornelia’s passing. The talk will also chronicle Maurice and Nik’s work together to make her vision a reality since her death, through letters written to her.

Nik Heynen is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia. His research theorizes and demonstrates empirically how racialized processes of capitalism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism produce structurally unjust geographies and ecologies. Trained as an urban geographer, Nik has published research based in Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Atlanta and New Orleans, and is now thinking about cities in the U.S. South and has several streams of research in the southern cities.

Nik has worked for nearly a decade with the Saltwater Geechee community on Sapelo Island on the restoration of traditional agricultural practices and flood mitigation made necessary as a result of descendants losing their land to development pressure and increasing sea-level rise. Through this work, he co-directs UGA’s Cornelia Walker Bailey Program on Land and Agriculture with Maurice Bailey.

Nik served on the editorial collective of Antipode and was the founding Chair of Antipode’s Institute for the Geographies of Justice (IGJ). He has also served as an editor for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and he helped establish the University of Georgia Press book series Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation, as well as was a founding editor of the journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.