Anne Bonds

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee | UWM · Department of Geography

In May 2020, Christian Cooper, a Black man and avid birder in New York City’s Central Park, was reported to the police by Amy Cooper, a White woman enraged at his request that she leash her dog. His cell phone recording of the encounter generated immediate national outcry and she faced misdemeanor charges—later dropped—for making a false report. On...

Transforming Justice is a collaborative project that aims to challenge the dominant narratives of policing and segregation in Milwaukee through community workshops, visual arts and storytelling, and experimental mapping. This Practices and Curations contribution describes one of the project’s collaborations, a design challenge, that aimed to create...

In this second report on research about race and ethnicity in geography, I build from growing scholarly interest in the geographies of white supremacy to consider white women’s central role in the production and maintenance of white supremacy in the United States. I discuss some of the conceptual approaches and critical interventions of Black and a...

Human Geography

This article analyzes how the spatial metaphor of 53206, a zip code within the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, connects with crises in the legitimacy of policing and politicians’ claims to care about Black lives. It examines how, in the context of deepening racialized poverty, ongoing mobilizations against police violence, and increasing rates of vio...

In this short essay debating the politics of resilience, I draw from the circulation of resilience discourses following the Milwaukee Uprising of 2016 to argue that critiques of resilience planning in such cities of the global west must be situated within the context of racial capitalism. I further contend that resilience-informed urban projects ar...

In this report, I focus on property, particularly housing, as an essential race-making institution and consider its connections to the carceral state. I examine renewed attention to property within geography and some of the ways that scholars are engaging with property regimes as a means to theorize race. Situating property within the context of ra...

On 2 January 2016, armed anti-government protestors took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (MNWR) in rural Oregon. The takeover of the MNWR is part of a larger, much longer set of movements called the Sagebrush Rebellion that has come to define contemporary white contestations about the federal regulation of lands in the American West. Spec...

Feminist scholarship is proliferating at the margins of political, urban, and economic geography and migrating to the (somewhat amorphous) centers of these sub-disciplines. In this intervention, we associate this ‘feminist upsurge’ with the desire to reconsider economic geographers’ theoretical and conceptual toolkits in the face of multi-dimension...

We argue that understanding contemporary geographies of race and militarism is predicated on understandings of settler colonialism and white supremacy. Settler colonialism is a continuously unfolding project of empire that is enabled by and through specific racial configurations that are tied to geographies of white supremacy. In a U.S. context, se...

This article examines themes in geographical research on poverty. Given the highly contested nature of the term, I begin with an overview of debates about definitions of poverty. This discussion contrasts absolute and relative poverty measures and critically assesses some of the assumptions embedded with dominant poverty definitions. Next, the arti...

This paper builds from scholarship on whiteness and white privilege to argue for an expanded focus that includes settler colonialism and white supremacy. We argue that engaging with white supremacy and settler colonialism reveals the enduring social, economic, and political impacts of white supremacy as a materially grounded set of practices. We si...

The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditi...

In this paper, we explore a “grassroots” neighborhood revitalization effort engendered at the national scale without regard to local geographies of race and class. Specifically, we examine the Harambee Great Neighborhood Initiative, convened by the well-known nonprofit Habitat for Humanity together with Milwaukee’s Local Initiatives Support Corpora...

This article draws from geographic engagements with theories of racialization and NIMBYism to explore connections between economic development and the relational construction of racial identities. I investigate the discourses of local white leadership surrounding two interconnected economic agendas crafted with the goal of remaking the central Oreg...

In this paper, I provide a critical overview of research in economic geography on race and racialization. I begin with a discussion about the connections between geography and processes of racialization. I then move into an examination of the kinds of engagements economic geographers are undertaking in research examining racial difference and the r...

A troubling paradox characterizes the current political and economic landscape in the United States: poverty, inequality, and homelessness have all but disappeared from the contemporary political agenda except in ideological campaigns that advocate individual responsibility and the market as the solution to impoverishment and inequality. Yet povert...

This project extends poverty research by addressing the lack of knowledge about place and race differences in poverty processes (Blank 20057. Blank , R. 2005. Poverty, policy and place: How poverty and policies to alleviate poverty are shaped by local characteristics. Regional Science Review, 28(4): 441–64. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all r...

  The soaring expansion of the US prison population is transforming the geographies of both urban and rural landscapes. As the trend in mass incarceration persists, depressed rural spaces are increasingly associated with rising prison development and the increasing criminalization of rural communities of disadvantage. Drawing on in-depth archival a...

This paper examines interconnected processes of economic restructuring and representations of poor subjects that rely on imaginaries of race, ethnicity, class and rural space. We argue that poverty and privilege are mutually produced and so we focus on the representational practices of White leaders in persistently poor counties across the American...

This research explores the geographical processes (re)shaping the call center industry in the rural American West. In light of growing public debate concerned with globalization and the "outsourcing" of information service jobs from Western, industrialized locations to 'third world' nations, I argue that it is also significant to document the expan...

Comments on the D. W. Johnson and R. T. Johnson article (see record 2001-03059-001) which discussed the contribution of psychology to civil political discourse in a democracy. This commentary focuses on feminist insights into concepts of equality, citizenship, democracy, and political discourse and how such a perspective may raise issues and quest...