Derek H. Alderman

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• PhD
• Professor at University of Tennessee at Knoxville

In this article, we make three contributions to our understanding of place-based Confederate commemoration. First, we demonstrate that neighborhoods are a widespread yet understudied site of Confederate commemoration through an inventory of 297 southern United States neighborhoods commemorating the Confederacy (NCCs) with neighborhood or street nam...

Exacerbated but by no means invented by President Donald Trump, post-truth politics are defined as a disregard for facts in political discourse and policymaking. The post-truth era is dominated by two forms of informational praxis: misinformation and disinformation. Through the archival record of civil rights organizations, we argue we should not s...

The Southeastern Geographer has long been recognized within geography as one of the most respected regional journals. Unfortunately, those outside our discipline tended to view the journal as parochial due to its regional focus. This work presents recent digital readership data for the Southeastern Geographer which shows that 43% of readership is o...

In recent years, commemorative naming has been discussed and called into question in the U.S. military, and with the establishment of the Confederate Naming Commission by Congress in 2021, representatives for branches of the US military and Department of Defense were tasked with evaluating commemorative practices associated with valorizing Confeder...

GIS students and faculty at the University of Tennessee are engaged in a long-standing and ongoing community-academic partnership with the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, a local African-American-led nonprofit heritage advocacy organization. The partnership supports the Beck’s development of a “Black restorative cartography” that carries out the mem...

The naming of places on university campuses plays an important role in shaping the cultural landscapes and geographies of higher education institutions. In recent years, there have been contentious debates over place renaming at colleges and universities in North America and around the world, which has drawn increasing attention to the politics of...

Renaming practices are increasingly deployed as a political technology in USA campaigns to do greater justice to the rights, histories, and identities of historically marginalized groups. African American social actors and groups have been especially active in this onomastic or naming activism. To fully make sense of this renaming moment, which is...

In July of 2022, the University of Tennessee and the Tennessee Geographic Alliance hosted a three-week summer institute funded by the National Endowment for Humanities. Eighteen K-12 educators from across the country came to Knoxville to explore "The Role of Geographic Mobility in the African American Freedom Struggle. " The institute focused on Mo...

This lesson teaches about Black geographies of mobility and The Negro Motorist Green Book. Students will access an ArcGIS Story Map related to The Green Book to understand changing Black travel patterns and spaces. More specifically, students will use The Green Book as a springboard for reflecting on the negative effects of building Interstate 94 i...

The background and resources presented here support teaching about two Tent/Freedom Cities—in Fayette County, Tennessee, and in Lowndes County, Alabama—that were built as a form of civil rights resistance and for housing Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers evicted by oppressive white landlords for marching, attending mass mobilization meetings,...

In July of 2022, the University of Tennessee and the Tennessee Geographic Alliance hosted a three-week summer institute funded by the National Endowment for Humanities. Eighteen K-12 educators from across the country came to Knoxville to explore “The Role of Geographic Mobility in the African American Freedom Struggle.” The institute focused on M...

This paper offers the intellectual goals and content that guided a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) K-12 Summer Institute entitled “The Role of Geographic Mobility in the African American Freedom Struggle.” Readers are provided background and concepts for exploring Black geographies of mobility in classrooms. Geographic mobility is...

The Living Black Atlas seeks to create space within geospatial classrooms and workplaces for curating, amplifying, and learning from the seldom-discussed cartographic practices undergirding the African American Freedom Struggle. Beyond a static collection of maps, the Atlas comprises dynamic understandings of the Black experience that challenge sta...

Memorial toponyms represent highly charged civic issues within communities, but many elected officials, journalists, citizen groups, and even some scholars lack a full understanding of these struggles and what they mean. Although often taken for granted, commemorative place naming is important to people’s storytelling, lived material experiences, a...

Sports cultures are deeply involved in reinforcing but also in challenging racial identities, hierarchies, and inequalities. Yet, racism in motorsports has received limited academic attention along with the history of African Americans challenging White supremacy in auto racing. We work to recover the Black geographies of competitive driving that h...

Yi-Fu Tuan published extensively in a number of outlets throughout his long career, including in the Geographical Review between 1968 and 2002. While Tuan’s influence on research and teaching in geography was far reaching, he also inspired scholars in other disciplines, such as education and environmental psychology. This retrospective essay commem...

Dénommer les lieux du monde est une opération humaine essentielle de territorialisation. Elle peut être objet de conflits ou de contestations. Elle se décline de nombreuses manières qui ont à voir avec les rapports à l’espace individuel et collectif, les imaginaires et les identités associés. Les traces des noms de lieux ou toponymes sont également...

Conflicts over public health, in the face of COVID-19, and the older but no less lethal pandemic of white supremacy and police brutality against people of color are indicative of the central place that landscape plays within the struggle to create a more just and sustainable society. These realities raise a key question for scholars and practitione...

Our paper revisits a neglected chapter in the history of geographic education-the civil rights organization SNCC and the Freedom Schools it helped establish in 1964. An alternative to Mississippi's racially segregated public schools, Freedom Schools addressed basic educational needs of Black children while also creating a curriculum to empower them...

While Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, and Highland work to recover the lives of people enslaved by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, their institutional missions emphasize the importance of these four men within American history. The resulting impediments to honoring Black lives within these spaces can be best understood using the a...

Automobile-based tourism during the USA Jim Crow era, while providing a mechanism for African Americans to circumvent institutionalized discrimination and segregation, was nonetheless fraught with anti-black harassment and denied accommodations, and even violence. The emotional geographies that undergirded this Jim Crow travel have traditionally no...

Remembering Enslavement explores plantation museums as sites for contesting and reforming public interpretations of slavery in the American South. Emerging out of a three-year National Science Foundation grant (2014–17), the book turns a critical eye toward the growing inclusion of the formerly enslaved within these museums, specifically examining...

Social disparities in NAEP student outcomes with respect to geography provide further evidence of how far the discipline of Geography still must go to address issues of diversity, equity, inclusion. Addressing these issues requires difficult but necessary conversations and planning of initiatives along with a more fundamental re-envisioning of what...

The Free Southern Theater was a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) initiative that wanted to bring theatrical performance to rural communities in the deep Southeastern United States. To interpret the critical praxis and broader analytical importance of the Free Southern Theater, we develop and apply two conceptual frameworks: radical...

The Free Southern Theater was a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) initiative that wanted to bring theatrical performance to rural communities in the deep Southeastern United States. To interpret the critical praxis and broader analytical importance of the Free Southern Theater, we develop and apply two conceptual frameworks: radical...

Louise Jefferson, the focus of this article, represents the intersection of two neglected cartographic cultures – women and African Americans – in the mid-twentieth century. Her work as an artist – illustrator, photographer, and cartographer – as well as her life story demonstrates that maps are more than we have conventionally defined them to be....

Responding to rising social tensions and ongoing theoretical and political changes in the study of geography, we advocate for greater operationalizing of anti-racism pedagogies within the field. Such pedagogies undermine long-standing geographic knowledge systems that marginalize and misrepresent people of color while also distorting and misinformi...

Responding to recent work in critical cartographic studies and Black Geographies, the purpose of this paper is to offer a conceptual framework and a set of evocative cartographic engagements that can inform geography as it recovers the seldom discussed history of counter-mapping within the African American Freedom Struggle. Black resistant cartogra...

This photo essay (interactive version available at https://www.focusongeography.org/publications/photoessays/alderman/index.html) offers a visual and narrative exploration of the memory-work in Equal Justice Institute's National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the affective power of its mission and message, its broader situation within memorial lan...

In 2013, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma ‘renamed’ Brady Street in its downtown arts district to M.B. Brady Street and designated the road as Reconciliation Way to rid itself of ties to Wyatt ‘Tate’ Brady, the original namesake. Tate Brady, a Ku Klux Klan leader, participated in a 1921 massacre that killed, injured, and displaced many black Tulsans. Ho...

Tourism transformation must bring an actionable focus on equity. A new normal openly recognizes the crises and tensions inhabiting tourism well before the COVID-19 pandemic along with the holistic and integrated nature of a pro-equity agenda. A resilient post-pandemic tourism must be more equitable and just, in terms of how it operates, its effects...

One of the earliest signals of the severity of the spread of COVID-19 in the United States and other countries was the swift cancelation of many highly prominent amateur and professional sporting events and seasons like the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, known as “March Madness.” The loss of March Madness is treated as a moment of cre...

Scholars are increasingly studying memory-work as an essential place-defining force within cities, but few scholars have analyzed urban redevelopers as agents of memory-work. Using the Montgomery Builds effort to redevelop the Kress Building as a "memory moment," we argue for a broader reading of memory-work that recognizes the broad spectrum of so...

There are growing debates over removing the names of racist historical figures from public schools and university campus buildings, streets, and other public spaces. This article develops a pedagogical framework for transforming the classroom into a “toponymic workspace,” where students can understand and possibly make interventions in the politics...

Memorials and monuments are of increasing interest to geographers, growing out of recognition of the social nature of commemoration, and the important role that the construction, interpretation, and contestation of spaces and places play in the process and politics of remembering. Geographers envision these public symbols as part of larger cultural...

Key Points • Geography's ongoing archival turn is redefining the ethics of conducting research through archival collections. • Archival work requires an interrogation of the ideologies and social relations that legitimate knowledge and how power flows in and through archival collections. • Researchers play a crucial role in shaping the archive itse...

This article advances three interrelated arguments. First, by focusing on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Research Department, an undertheorized chapter in the civil rights movement, we advance an expressly spatialized understanding of the African American freedom struggle. Second, by focusing on an SNCC-produced pamphlet tit...

To realize the full educational value of The Green Book requires seeing it as more than just an historical documentary source or a mere artifact from an earlier period. Inspired by the work of historical sociologist and geographer Adrian Evans, we stress the need to enliven the travel guide by recovering the seemingly ordinary details of how and wh...

Foundational to Jim Crow era segregation and discrimination in the United States was a “ra-cialized reputational politics,” that constructed African Americans as not only inferior, but as villainous threats to the normative order, leading to the lynching of thousands of African Americans. While black villainy is a destructive force within society,...

This article, structured as a prompt-and-response work, is authored by members of a research team investigating how slavery is absent and present at tourism plantation museums in the U.S. South. The prompt for the discussion grew out of E. Arnold Modlin’s concern that, even at museums where narratives and landscapes center on enslaved people, the p...

We revisit Martin Luther King Jr’s famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail (2013 [1963]), using his words to frame our thinking about the promise, limits, and efficacy of dialogue. The life and death politics of everyday oppressed people should directly inform any consideration of the merits of scholars engaging in (or disengaging from) dialogue, what...

Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall: Displaced and Ephemeral Public Memories vividly illustrates that a nation’s history is more complicated than the simple binary of remembered/forgotten. Some parts of history, while not formally recognized within a commemorative landscape, haunt those landscapes by virtue of their ephemeral or displaced presence...

This special forum, derived from a featured session at the 2017 meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in Boston, seeks to carry out a grounded discussion of public intellectualism during the turbulent Trump era and beyond. Our hope is to demonstrate the capacity of geographers to participate in and contribute to debates beyond th...

Museums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors’ experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within s...

This innovative book provides a dynamic—and often surprising—view of the range of environmental issues facing the United States today. A distinguished group of scholars examines the growing temporal, spatial, and thematic breadth of topics historical geographers are now exploring. Seventeen original chapters examine topics such as forest conservati...

Situated just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, Middleton Place Plantations and Gardens must surely rank among the most beautiful places in the Southeastern United States. These “oldest formal gardens in North America,” feature structural elements found at Versailles as well as a terraced lawn sloping down to the Ashley River. During peak seas...

Through our engagement with the ‘Freedom Singers’, we advocate for approaching the archive through the racial politics of atmosphere to understand both the affective, emotion-laden practices of the past and the affective work carried out by contemporary researchers within the archive. This atmosphere provides an important pathway for identifying an...

A number of U.S. universities are embroiled in debates over the long-time commemoration and valorization of white supremacy through the campus landscape. Recognizing place naming as a legitimate political arena, activists have called for—and in some instances succeeded—in removing from university buildings the names of historical figures shrouded i...

In the southeastern United States, operators of plantation museums have traditionally engaged in a selective and romanticised remembrance of the antebellum past that has regrettably silenced and marginalised the historical experiences and struggles of enslaved African people. More recently, some plantation managers have sought to engage in the ‘mem...

Heritage tourism plays an increasingly important yet controversial role in interpreting the emotionally and politically charged memories and legacies of African enslavement. Antebellum plantation museums in the southeastern USA remain relatively underanalyzed by researchers, despite their tradition of ignoring and minimizing the contributions and s...

Over the past few years, a number of U.S. colleges and universities have become embroiled in debates over the long-time commemoration and valorization of white supremacy on and through the campus landscape. Recognizing place naming as a legitimate political arena, the continued inequalities and alienation faced by students and faculty of color, and...

This paper examines owners of plantation heritage tourism sites as memorial entrepreneurs who control and negotiate the inclusion and specific treatment of the history of African enslavement. Interviews with owners of four South Louisiana plantations are used to document and analyse their complex relationship with the topic of slavery. Interviewed...

This article explores spatial mobility as a form of African American resistance and self-determination. We argue for examining the everyday activism and “countermobility work” of ordinary people of color as they move in ways that subvert, negotiate, and survive white supremacy. These ideas are developed through a historical case study not typically...

On 17 June 2015 Dylann Roof, a self-avowed white supremacist, walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and sat down for a Bible study. After spending forty-five minutes attending the service, he pulled a Glock 41 .45 caliber handgun from his backpack and opened fire, killing nine people. Roof then fled and was ultimately arrested twen...

Invited contribution to Sacred Matters: Religious Currents in Culture, web magazine for public scholarship. Available online at https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/sacredmatters/2015/08/13/graceland-graffiti-elvis-fans-as-place-makers-and-memory-agents/

Invited contribution to Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina, open access project directed by Fitzhugh Brundage and published by Carolina Digital Library and Archives. http://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/features/essays/alderman_two/

Invited contribution to Commemorative Landscapes in North Carolina, open access project directed by Fitzhugh Brundage and published by Carolina Digital Library and Archives. http://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/features/essays/alderman_one/

Memorials and monuments are of increasing interest to geographers, growing out of recognition of the social nature of commemoration and the important role that space and place play in the process and politics of remembering. Geographers envision these public symbols as part of larger cultural landscapes that not only reflect certain perspectives on...