Circling the Herd: Houston’s Black Trail Riders, Placemaking and the Liberatory Potential of Second Sites
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For decades, scholarship on Black communities has framed Black spaces as sites of deficit and pathology. Despite marginalization within mainstream sociology, Black scholars have consistently pointed instead to the placemaking power and geographic knowledges unique to Black experiences. This paper makes two critical interventions: first, revisiting the foundational work of W.E.B. Du Bois to engage its implicitly spatial analysis and reorient urban sociology. Second, drawing on the experiences of Houston’s Black trail riding communities to offer an empirical reflection of the material and imaginative ways Black placemaking connects space, place and time. Through interviews with 21 trail riders and observations of rides and gatherings, this study details the material and non-material dimensions of second site production, a framework that highlights the collectively produced sense of space, place and time that contains an alternative to dominant urban development paradigms.
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Binkovitz, Leah. "Circling the Herd: Houston’s Black Trail Riders, Placemaking and the Liberatory Potential of Second Sites." (2021) Master’s Thesis, Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/110423.