In this piece, our Geography for All Coordinator Jasmine Roberts speaks with Zenzo Sibanda, a final-year doctoral researcher at King’s College London. Drawing on his work on Black placemaking in the Geography Department at King’s, Zenzo offers his perspective on belonging, identity and the everyday interventions that can (re)shape academic spaces for Black geographers.
What is placemaking?
Theresa Wheele and colleagues write that placemaking is about how people go about feeling like they belong to a place. For example, black geographers try to make geography a discipline that they belong to as knowledge creators and not just research subjects. They participate in decisions and day-to-day life in ways previously inaccessible to them, thereby ‘making place’ for black people too in geography.
Placemaking offers deliberate daily means to Black geographers to centre themselves in a discipline that has and continues to benefit so much from their experiences but has for so long relegated their status to the peripheries of knowledge production.
Black placemaking allows focused and deliberate efforts that will arguably go to the political root of experiences of exclusion together with Black bodies, and emerge progressively in ways that are relevant, jointly created and owned.
What model of geography are you seeking to challenge/displace?
It is a well-known fact that Geography, much like most academic disciplines, is a historically ‘white’ discipline. I mean this in the sense that its founders, and for a long time its only recognised experts, were all white. They moulded the subject in their own image and sense of the world, leaving out their non-white colleagues in its production. Geography emerged and grew on the ‘privilege of adventure’ that was for so long the preserve of the white male who claimed its discoveries. Such characters and values pasted across sites, institutions, and frameworks that have shaped what it means to be a Geographer.
Take for instance the famous explorer David Livingstone, who platformed important geographic features such as Mosi-oa-Tunya, ‘the smoke that thunders’, which he renamed ‘Victoria Falls’. Livingstone gained prominence for these and many other ‘discoveries’ in Africa, but for too long little was known about the Black colleagues in Africa, such as James Chuma and Abdullah Susi who facilitated his travels towards these ‘discoveries’, who were themselves no less Geographers than Livingstone. All were equally passionate and curious enough about the world to lead important geographical expeditions. Yet it is only Livingstone that gained prominence in historical record.
How has Geography moved and what hasn’t changed?
Significant progress has been made since Livingstone’s day to recognise Black geographers. However, research by Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye shows that Black students and academic staff in geography departments in UK universities often face being excluded, microaggressions, and feeling out of place.
Similarly, Maya Manzi, Diana Ojeda, and Roberta Hawkins found that geographers, generally, can struggle to build and sustain meaningful, caring, and politically engaged relations to the places they live and work. In this sense, Geography has progressed to acknowledging and placing Black bodies in place within the discipline, but its enduring historic political design systematically keeps Black people out of place within it. This produces difficult and hard to articulate experiences by Black geographers that largely go unnoticed and make for truly challenging daily experiences.
Can you tell us more about your research project?
Some of such experiences were shared in our research project, Black placemaking in the Geography department at King’s College London, funded by the College’s Race Equity & Inclusive Education Fund (REIEF). The project advanced previous research by the department’s Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Committee. This research was about Decolonising from the ground up, and noted experiences of ‘(un)belonging’ expressed by Black, Asian, and other ethnically minoritised groups. When it came about, the black placemaking project was a product of chance and experience: the call for REIEF proposals came at a moment when I was having conversations with some of the few Black geographers about how they were getting on at King’s, mostly trying to work out if my own experience was making sense.
The Black placemaking project found that for Black students and staff, King’s was often initially experienced as very white and unwelcoming. Although, deliberate efforts at diversity in staffing and senior leadership efforts at addressing this issue were recognised as making an important difference.
Black geographers and academic and professional services staff shared a diversity of experiences under this theme and believed that genuine progress could be made as was already being seen in the Department. The dynamics of place clearly matter in Black experience of academia and this warrants conversation.
What do you hope the project will go on to achieve and how do you imagine its afterlives?
Practitioners of Geography across the UK, and indeed the globe, must openly interrogate what Black placemaking means for their departments and discipline. In doing so, they should consider the unique ways in which Black geographers may have been stifled and excluded in their contexts. There is most certainly no single placemaking solution to advance Black geography across all institutions. But having an honest conversation about it is an important place to start, just as some Departments such as the King’s College London Geography Department has done.
Achieving lasting transformation of Geography as a discipline will require such concerted efforts at holding up the mirror at oneself and being honest about what you see and therefore what needs to change.
Most university departments will already have commendable policies, institutions, and practices to advance inclusivity and so Black placemaking may seem or sound like more of the same. Aside what is already in place, deliberately supporting positive Black experiences in Geography as a discipline and material space is critical. Black placemaking avoids treating ethnically minoritised experiences as being the same, allowing space to articulate and address unique experiences of exclusion.
Addressing historical injustices in the development of academic disciplines needs much more than rhetorical and regulatory commitments to inclusivity; it requires active political engagement to transform disciplines beyond grand pronouncements. Placemaking offers Black geographers and Geography such means where everyone is important to the process and contributes to removing barriers that hold back a discipline so rich in knowledge and critical for human progress.
About the author: Zenzo Sibanda is a final year PhD student at the King’s College London Geography department. His research interests include the human dimensions of climate change, particularly adaptation, resilience, and mobility, and what it means for these strategies to fail; Black geographies and praxis, including anti-Blackness, Black placemaking, Pro-Black Pedagogy, and Decolonising the University, Curriculum, and Higher Education. Zenzo’s experience includes teaching and assessing student performance as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the department, and over 15 years in International Development consulting across sub-Saharan Africa and the UK.
Suggested further reading
Dobson, J. (2026) Civic Geographies of Care: Mapping the Scope and Scales of Universities’ Civic Action. Area. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70121.
Hawthorne, C. (2025) Mapping Black geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12700
How to cite
Sibanda, Z. (2026, June) Placemaking: Is it useful to Black Geographers and Geography? Geography Directions. https://doi.org/10.55203/HPPO7488
Geography Directions 