On the intersection of Black geographies and policy mobilities: Tracing circuits of anti-racism in Newcastle upon Tyne

This paper reflects theoretically on the intersection of Black geographies and policy mobilities by tracing the historical and contemporary movements of Black activists, intellectuals and anti-racist struggles in Newcastle upon Tyne. While Black geographies foregrounds Black spatial imaginaries, resistance and epistemologies rooted in racial capitalism and coloniality, it has insufficiently interrogated how racialized policy formations and their circulations function transjurisdictionally. Likewise, policy mobilities, which charts the movement and mutation of urban policy models across contexts, offers an opportunity to expose the racialized structures underpinning these movements. This paper develops a conceptual approach that examines how race and power circulate through circuits of racialized spatial practices, Black actors and political thought and anti-racist struggles. The paper traces how Black individuals, ideas and infrastructures – routed through historical visits by Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass and Muhammad Ali as well as through contemporary cultural programs like Freedom City and protest movements like Black Lives Matter – are mobilized within and beyond the urban. In so doing, it advances a global, relational understanding of Black spatial politics that provokes a rethinking of urban theory’s Euro-American biases.