UC Press Blog

The following is an excerpt from “Oakland as Subject and Setting: Doing Black Geographies in Place,” a panel at the 2026 Association of American Geographers Conference held in San Francisco. It featured Dr. Kaily Heitz, Dr. Alex Werth (UC Press author of On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland), Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers (author of the forthcoming UC Press book, Oakland Echoes: Reimagining and Reclaiming the Black City, Spring 2027), and Dr. reelaviolette botts-ward, all of whom have written, or are writing, books on Black Oakland geographies. The conversation was moderated by Clara Pérez Medina, a doctoral student in geography at UC Berkeley.

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Clara Pérez Medina: Tell us a little about the topic and argument of each of your books.

Kaily Heitz: The book that I've been working on is called Oakland Is a Vibe. Oakland is known for its Black cultural spaces, radical politics, and businesses, which are characterized in terms of their “vibe.” But the idea of vibe has become ubiquitous. We go into a room and say, "Oh, that's a vibe," or, "This is not the vibe." Or now you look at Google Maps and it says, "What's the local vibe?" 

In recent decades, the City of Oakland has tried to sell that sense of vibe. Oakland has a Black aesthetic. It's often been treated as a negative, like a sore point for the city. But now it’s been flipped—to think with Brandi's work on “Black aesthetic emplacement”—so that the aesthetics of Blackness are intentionally utilized to make the city attractive for a non-Black audience. 

Working at that level, vibe is a dispossessive logic. It's a logic of racial capitalism. At the same time, there are people who are running Black cultural events and businesses saying, "We want that for ourselves. We are the producers of this vibe. How do we keep it?" The puzzle at the center of the book is the perennial question of how do we produce and understand Black life as beautiful, and make spaces that are beautiful, without losing that to these dispossessive, anti-Black logics of racial capitalism.

reelaviolette botts-ward: My book is called Homegirl Healing, and it's about how homegirls heal. The book is organized in five rituals. Ritual zero is the Welcome. Ritual one is the Body and the Town. Ritual two is the Home and the Self. Ritual three is the Sisters and the Circle. Ritual four is the Ancestors and the Astral Plane. And ritual five is the Departure. 

Each section of the book takes you deeper into intimate geographies of homegirls in Oakland. It looks at how unhoused and housing insecure Black women in Oakland are imagining what home can look and feel like for us in the wake of these layers of displacement. So, I’m thinking about “homegirl” not just as someone you feel at home with, but also someone who is constantly making home within and for themself and in communal spaces in the midst of moments when home may feel quite precarious.

Alex Werth: My book, On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland, looks at the role of Black dance music and everyday sonic practices within both contemporary struggles over displacement and the long arc of the Black freedom struggle in Oakland. I write about Black sonic politics as spatial matters that are key to understanding contestations over Oakland's urban landscapes. I think that we’re trained to think about Black popular music and cultural production as politicized. But I argue that the political significance of Black dance music comes to exist through concrete struggles over urban spaces in particular places and times. 

One example is how the coding of hip-hop music in Oakland as “Black noise”—with a nod to the hip-hop scholar Tricia Rose—intersected with what I call a “war on nuisance” during the post–Civil Rights Era in ways that materially contributed to the advancement of broken windows policing in the city. So, I think about the articulation of the music itself with the political economic context in ways that have real and devastating effects. 

Brandi Thompson Summers: My book is called Oakland Echoes: Reimagining and Reclaiming the Black City. I’m from Oakland. But I had to reckon with the fact that Oakland didn’t feel like home anymore because it didn’t feel as Black. I do that by thinking through the destruction and persistent resistance of Black Oakland across seven decades of urbicide—the intentional killing of Black urban space. Through the concept of the “spectral city,” I look at Black Oakland as simultaneously a disappearing demographic reality and an omnipresent cultural force that's haunting the landscape even as displacement accelerates. 

I’m from Oakland. But I had to reckon with the fact that Oakland didn’t feel like home anymore because it didn’t feel as Black.

Against the backdrop of urbicide, I excavate what I call “archives of the Black city.” I look at cultural production, spatial practices, and acts of recovery through which Black Oaklanders insist upon presence despite erasure. For instance, I do close readings of two 2018 films by Black filmmakers and think about recovery as distinct from repair. Not returning to this original state, but insisting on the right to make anew in places that are marked by destruction. So, I’m refusing both nostalgia and despair. Instead, I'm thinking about haunting as a way to understand how Black communities across the country persist, resist, and reimagine urban futures when material conditions seem to foreclose them. 

KH: There's so much mourning and heaviness that's caught up in the stories that we're telling about Oakland—that we're telling about Black spaces and Black life. And that's something that Black geographies, as a field, is really grappling with—not ignoring the death or the destruction and the loss. But also asking, “What are those spaces of recovery that are going on anyway?” Vibe feels like a little bit of an echo of that.

CPM: How and when did you come to Oakland? How did that influence your approach to your research?

KH: The idea of Oakland being a vibe emerged from the time when I moved here in 2015. The political focus that was emerging was around gentrification, and especially the role of arts and culture in the redevelopment of downtown Oakland. And what compelled me—as a newcomer to this space, as someone who's not from Oakland—was the way that Black arts and cultural spaces, or business spaces, really drew me in. I wasn't alone in that. Folks would say, "Yeah, there's something about this place that really centers and grounds and holds Blackness, and especially Black radical politics, without feeling exclusive." I think that's on purpose. There’s a politics of solidarity that’s at the heart of some of these spaces in Oakland. So, I started to characterize that, or hear that characterized, as “vibe.”

AW: My project emerged out of the dance between who I am and what I brought with me to this place and what was going on outside of me in popular culture and public debate. I arrived in Oakland in 2009, in the middle of the foreclosure crisis, a period of highly orchestrated Black dispossession. In the 2010s, when I was trying to navigate my place in the city, and figure out a research project, there were these interlocking questions. There was this form of redevelopment that was predicated on a creative economy or cultural discourse, which Kaily alluded to. There was the intensifying struggle around gentrification and displacement. And there was the Black Lives Matter movement, which was first articulated and put on a window in Oakland in 2013. That was the context in which I was trying to figure out how to contribute to the popular understanding of what was going on and how to resist and refuse these dynamics. 

As a white person from New England who moved to Oakland during this time, there was always going to be a question of outsider-ness. I eventually found my way into a place of solidarity and organizing not from my role as a scholar, but actually my role as a DJ and dancer. Ultimately, I ended up focusing on Black sonic politics because of these encounters with pleasure and policing that were occurring for me in the realm of nightlife, cultural production, and cultural organizing. 

At the time, everything was explained in terms of gentrification. But once I started to look at the long history of some of these cultural practices that folks were using in order to hold onto a sense of cultural preservation and Black place-making in the city—as well as the genealogy of particular instruments of governance, like noise ordinances or nightclub regulations—it became clear that a present time–oriented account of gentrification was insufficient. 

BTS: This project has taken several years because I was living here and then I left. I realized that I had to leave to finish the book. It changed quite a bit once I moved, and also once my grandmother passed. Grief brought me back to the book. I wasn't emotionally connected to it until I dealt with my grief. I think that's important to think about with ethnography or mixed methods—to understand how to answer your own questions. Really what guided me was like, why does Oakland feel and not feel Black? When I'd ask people those questions, like in my family (who all live outside of Oakland because they can’t afford it), everyone would go to the numbers of Black people in Oakland. But that's not enough to explain why Oakland still feels Black even when Oakland is no longer still Black. 

rbw: I came to this work as a homegirl who was trying to heal. The day I got to Oakland from LA, my spirit just was like…I don't know how to explain it. It just felt so healing to me. I feel like I became a healing artist because of Oakland. I needed to understand what was happening here. I was like, "Oh, so I can basically just go to healing circles and call that my research? Okay, bet. That's what I'm about to do." I created the project that allowed me to do what I needed to deepen my own healing journey.

It wasn't until I moved to Martin Luther King, Jr. and MacArthur Boulevards that the project took a different shape. My husband said to me, "You can't be writing about Black women healing in Oakland and not be talking about the housing crisis, not be talking about displacement, not be talking about unhoused Black women." I told him, "I don't wanna talk about unhoused Black women if I'm not in relationship with nobody." But then, in October, months after we moved to that corner, an encampment started two doors down. Those became our neighbors and our friends. In that sense, where I lived in Oakland mattered so much to what I was writing.

The closest neighbor that I had who lived in the encampment passed away, and that was such a tragedy. There was such a heaviness on our corner after my neighbor died. The last section of the book, the Departure, is about—similar to what you were talking about, Brandi—how I had to leave. Leaving forced me to write about the city differently. I was grieving this place that I grew to love so deeply. I'm still trying to figure out how to honor my neighbor who passed away. I'm still trying to figure out how to honor Oakland through these sort of intimate relationships. Those were my neighbors, and they taught me so much about healing and home.

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Oakland has a sound. That sonic representation of grief, survival, celebration, and pride can be found in a playlist curated by Alex Werth in accompaniment of On Loop. You can hear it here on Spotify. 

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