(Re)Building Black Futures: Queer Restoration of Subprime Architectures in Baltimore, Maryland

• In Event: We Want to Stay: Queer of Color Materialism & Social Reproduction in Geographies of Transformation

Abstract

In Baltimore, black queer women have navigated the fraught political and spatial terrain of “economic recovery” in the post-2008 era while creatively reimagining community life, economics, and social reproduction otherwise within “geographies of foreclosure” (Schafran 2013). With a focus on Black Women Build-Baltimore (BWBB), “a homeownership and wealth building initiative that trains Black women in trades-related skills by restoring vacant and deteriorated houses in West Baltimore,” I consider the ways that BWBB complicates the meanings and contradictions of financial inclusion, black placemaking, and community economic development in the era of neoliberal racial capitalism.

Presenter

• Sa Whitley, Arizona State University