Guest Editors' Introduction: On the Future Geographies of the South

Abstract

[...]we wish to provoke readers to consider future analysis as a professional responsibility since future studies is vital to making interventions in public decision making and elevating the responsiveness of our discipline to problems, inequalities, and issues facing the world. on making southern futures We embark on this journey to reflect critically about the future geographic realities of the Southeast with a humility that such a project is inherently fraught with uncertainty and tension. The idea of a future South is not universally shared but socially and geographically contingent;it may have a different look, feel, and varying consequences for specific social groups, sub-regions, and individual actors and communities depending on their situation in that future. [...]underlying our collection of essays is a desire to ground or emplace-historically, geographically, and politically-any critical appraisal of a future, recognizing as Kurniawan and Kundurpi (2019, 1) do that "space may influence the way we perceive the future and how actors connected to this space will determine or undermine the kind of future to be unfolded." Because of the uneven and contingent nature of life in the South, the authors of this collection talk about the future not as a singular destination but as an inherently plural set of processes and practices at work within the region. Resistance to this climate gentrification and rebranding of Little Haiti is led by women of color organizers who "defend a community-driven process and protest the masculinist, top-down approaches to urban development" (Gierczyk 2020, para 1).