Keavy McFadden

Ph.D. candidate, Department of Geography
University of Minnesota

Drawing on urban geography, critical education studies, and feminist methodologies, Keavy’s Ph.D. research explores the centrality of education landscapes to imaginations, negotiations, and enactments of urban futures in Chicago. Her work asks: how do competing visions for Chicago’s future manifest and materialize in education infrastructure, political practices, and cultural representations? And why do education and educational practices take such a central role in the production of urban space and anticipatory politics in Chicago? Through her work, Keavy explores how narrow conceptions of education politics within geography might be productively expanded beyond formal schooling to include alternative spaces of learning and knowledge production/transfer. In doing so, she argues that such spaces are key sites through which to understand urban politics more broadly in Chicago. In addition to her work on education, Keavy is interested in critical cartography, poetry, and questions of epistemic justice and solidarity.