Prof. Nik Heynen
Department of Geography, University of Georgia

If you will be attending the AAG annual meeting in San Francisco, CA, please join us (either in-person or virtually) for the 2026 Antipode American Association of Geographers Lecture, “Knowing the World through the Politics of Invitation and Trespass: Letters to Mrs. Cornelia”, presented Prof. Nik Heynen (Department of Geography, University of Georgia) on Wednesday 18th March from 4:10pm to 5:30pm Pacific Time, in Continental 6, Ballroom Level, Hilton, Tower 1,2,3.

Abstract: In 2015, I was invited to sit at a kitchen table in a house on Sapelo Island. That kitchen table belonged to an important Gullah Geechee griot named Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey and her husband Mr. Julius. This singular invitation from Mrs. Cornelia led to many more invitations. Other invitations that sprung from the first included life-changing opportunities: to contribute to hurricane recovery and repair; bear witness to increased heirs’ property land loss; enact mitigation against sea-level rise and flooding; fight to prevent cultural genocide from devasting one of the last most intact Gullah Geechee communities left in the US; start teaching at Spelman College, where I witnessed how racial terror is experienced by students through a series of bomb threats; and build solidarity and partnership through the Penn Center, the first school in the South for formerly enslaved West Africans. That initial invitation also forced me to reckon with the politics of trespass and more deeply feel, experience, and understand loss and suffering. This epistolary talk, in conversation with Mrs. Cornelia who passed away in October 2017, will work through logics of spatial metaphor (following Neil Smith and Cindi Katz) to understand what Fred Donaldson asked me to see in the first issue of Antipode in 1969, that I read as an undergraduate student, in his paper Geography and the Black American: The White Papers and the Invisible Man. Thanks to Mrs. Cornelia’s invitation, I have come to understand what Donaldson was asking me to see as the Black genius loci.

Nik Heynen is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia, Athens, and Visiting Scholar in the Food Studies Program at Spelman College in Atlanta. He’s also Co-Director of UGA’s Cornelia Walker Bailey Program on Land, Sea, and Agriculture and Director of Education at the a Athens-based non-profit Shell to Shore.

As a former editor of Antipode and trustee of the Antipode Foundation, Nik will be well known to many. If not, just consider the accolades bestowed on him by the AAG in recent years. Nik was selected as an AAG Fellow in 2023 in recognition of a “sustained and exemplary record of research, mentorship, and service … an enduring impact on the discipline of geography”. In 2024, he received the Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice as “one of the most prominent voices in anti-racist geographical research”, highlighting not only his work on “environmental racism, racial capitalism, and political ecology” but also his “mentoring and advocating for future generations of anti-racism scholars, as well as translating scholarship into tangible and positive impacts through anti-racist community engagement activities”. Last year, 2025, the Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group presented the James Blaut Award in celebration of his transformative research on abolition ecology, urban political ecology, and radical geography more broadly. The group noted his partnerships with the Gullah Geechee community as demonstrating “how geography can challenge systems of oppression, resist land dispossession, and advance collective liberation … [a] vision of geography as a tool for dismantling oppression and building solidarity through scholarship and action”. And this year, 2026, Nik will be receiving the Presidential Achievement Award, which recognises “individuals who have made long-standing and distinguished contributions to the discipline of geography”—in Nik’s case, scholarship on social justice and ecological restoration, and collaborative work with the Geechee community on Sapelo Island in Georgia.

As well as Antipode, Nik has served as an editor of Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and the University of Georgia Press’ Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation book series. He also founded, almost 20 years ago, Antipode’s Institute for the Geographies of Justice, which has provided training and mentoring for grad students and early-career researchers since 2007 (over 200 have attended; many of them are today among the discipline’s leading lights). Suffice to say Nik and his work (some of which is available below) have been transformative and are well loved by the community—a community that he has played no small part in nurturing. As a scholar and an activist, a researcher and a teacher, a mentor and an advocate, Nik is a phenomenon; his commitment to the cause and his care for comrades is beyond inspiring.

We are absolutely delighted that he agreed to join us in San Francisco, and would be thrilled if you could join us there.

Some of Nik’s work published in the journal (free to download for the next six months):

“But it’s Alright, Ma, it’s Life, and Life Only”: Radicalism as Survival (Antipode, 38:5, 2006)

Neil Smith’s Long Revolutionary Imperative (Antipode, 49:S1, 2017)

On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place” (Antipode, 53:1, 2021)

“A plantation can be a commons”: Re-Earthing Sapelo Island through Abolition Ecology (Antipode, 53:1, 2021)

Featured image: Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco skyline from Hawk Hill; photograph by Daniel L. Lu (dllu) via Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-SA 4.0