About
Dr. Camilla A. Hawthorne is a critical human geographer and an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on migration, citizenship, racial capitalism, and the insurgent abolition geographies of the Black Mediterranean. She engages with these themes to explore complex social and spatial dynamics related to race, migration, and political economy. Dr. Hawthorne's work contributes to understanding the intersections of geography and social justice, particularly through the lens of abolitionist thought and practice in the Mediterranean context.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Gender studies
- Law
- Political economy
- Geography
- Anthropology
- Philosophy
- Ecology
Selected publications
The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity
The AAG Review of Books · 2025-10-03 · 1 citations
articleVisitation: policing the bodies of free women on the peripheries of the U.S. prison
Gender Place & Culture · 2025-07-06
articleOpen accessSenior authorCorrespondingUniversity of California, Santa Cruz.A fiercely brilliant and dedicated scholar-activist, she studied the intersections of gender and carcerality, with an emphasis on the experiences of women with incarcerated
Introduction: Black Italia and the Insurgent Politics of Knowledge Production
California Italian Studies · 2025-10-21
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThe field of Black Italian studies encompasses a wide array of subfields, methodological approaches, and intellectuals. In this introduction, we advance a provisional definition, conceived not as a definitive or rigidly prescriptive formulation but rather as an opening intervention intended to stimulate further theoretical elaboration and critical engagement with this evolving field. Using an intentionally broad and porous definition that does not seek to impose labels, we understand Black Italia as an interdisciplinary field of study characterized by a set of intellectual, political, and artistic practices and approaches that broadly aim at (re)centering and excavating the Black presence in the Italian and Italian speaking contexts. This presence encompasses African, Afrodescendant and Afrodiasporic histories, experiences, and cultural and artistic productions that, despite their existence, have been historically overlooked and marginalized.
European History Quarterly · 2025-04-01
article2024-06-07
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter reviews the growing body of work around Black geographies, its intellectual and political lineages, and wider contribution to the discipline of geography. The chapter explores some of the interconnected themes within Black geographies, namely, Black geographic imagination, racial capitalism, cities and policing, and racism and plantation futures. The chapter then highlights avenues for future research, including the need for studies to go beyond North America and engage with Latinx and Native/Indigenous geographies.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers · 2024-07-25 · 5 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This paper unfolds in three parts. In Part 1, I describe how I have contended with the fraught relationships among mapping, nationalism, and colonialism in my teaching and research. When writing my first book, Contesting Race and Citizenship , I had to reckon with the positivist impulse to enumerate and map Black Italianness—and, more broadly, with the politics of visibility at a time of increasingly virulent racial nationalisms, xenophobia, and outright anti‐Black violence. In Part 2, I describe the ways my own thinking about mapping has been pushed in new directions by insights from Black geographies. Drawing on Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, and Édouard Glissant—as well as essays from the edited volume The Black Geographic —I argue that Black geographic counter‐cartographies foreground insurgent Black spatial knowledges and practices that have always exceeded racial‐spatial violence, and approach mapping as both a material and poetic process. In Part 3, I conclude by advancing some tentative ideas about what it might mean to map new or alternative geographies of abolitionist struggle that attend to the interconnections between Black Atlantic and Black Mediterranean histories of racial capitalism.
Memory, Forgetfulness, and Multidimensional Acts of Resistance
Italian Culture · 2024-07-02
article1st authorCorresponding2023-09-11 · 7 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingIn the introduction, the editors present the history and implications of the Black Geographies discipline. In setting up the stakes for Black Geographies, the editors argue for the nonsingularity and nonuniversality of Blackness, its local and global reproduction through processes of circulation and diasporic routes, and the interplay of material and poetic processes. The introduction presents the epistemological challenges posed by Black Geographic thought to foundational categories such as space, scale, science, politics, and empire and how they draw attention to praxis to offer newer considerations of methodological and theoretical practice that emerges from the complex process of Black life.
2023-09-22 · 2 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2023-10-13
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 4 shared
Jovan Scott Lewis
University of California, Berkeley
- 4 shared
Jennifer L. Kelly
- 2 shared
Angelica Pesarini
University of Toronto
- 1 shared
Barbara Ofosu-Somuah
Duke University
- 1 shared
Paul Groth
- 1 shared
L. T. Jensen
- 1 shared
Shu-Wei Tsai
- 1 shared
Nathan Sayre
Labs
Education
- 2018
PhD, Geography
UC Berkeley
Awards & honors
- Woman of the Year by Il Corriere della Sera (2020)
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