Alissa Diamond

Entangled histories for indeterminate futures: racial capitalisms, resistances, and space in central Virginia

This project aims to illuminate present conditions in Charlottesville through the lens of sedimented and spatialized racial histories, with the intent to destabilize currently dominant founding narratives. I use a varied set of research approaches, including archival, genealogical, field observational, and activist research methods to probe the relational histories of Central Virginia and beyond. I engage framing theories that draw out relationships across scales and through time, including fractal logics and figure/ground based readings of social and spatial dynamics to structure this work.  Through this approach, I aspire to engender real shifts in perception and action in the lived, embodied world; opening up windows for surprise and the ongoing politicization of perception.  I hope this work will open doors to rethinking spatial practice, restructuring landscape-related pedagogies, exploring parallel presents and dreaming fantastical futures for the everyday by exploring spatial-social-racial relations in the Charlottesville area and beyond.

I am a woman who has spent most of my life in Virginia. I came to the field of landscape architecture via undergraduate studies in architecture, and stayed in Charlottesville to practice at Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape architects. My current work comes from a lifetime of accumulating questions.  In my education and in design practice, if racism was discussed at all, it was often in term of a Black/white binary. I found myself afloat in narratives of founding fathers, “beautiful” places, celebratory turnings from controversy, and ongoing dissonances between what was said about American exceptionalism against the disparities I saw in every corner.  In part this work is a personal grounding- using a relational approach across multiple spatial and temporal scales to write myself into my own existence.  What does it mean to be a person who intervenes in the landscape, with particular historical groundings, and how should I define my commitments and responsibilities to the places where I work?  At a larger scale, I seek to connect across multiple disciplines for both teaching and research: to bridge urban history (which tends toward the modern and the urban), and landscape history (which tends toward the antebellum and the rural); to connect spatial, the enacted, creative and the everyday to the historical, the structural, and the illusory.