About

Joshua Inwood holds a joint appointment with Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute and the Department of Geography. He is committed to understanding the material conditions of peace and justice through various research and teaching projects. His research aims to understand the social, political, and economic structures that make human lives vulnerable to exploitation, as well as how oppressed populations utilize social justice movements to improve their material conditions. Inwood's research connects Civil Rights and labor struggles in the U.S. South following the end of segregation, examining how legacies of racism, violence, and social activism continue to influence contemporary anti-racist struggles. His work contributes to literatures on urban spaces, political geographies, justice, and cultural geographies, emphasizing the importance of viewing social justice, anti-racist activism, and human rights within an international framework to foster broader understanding and ethical transformation of human vulnerability. Additionally, his focus on civil rights and violence has led him to engage with settler colonialism and its legacies.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Epistemology
• Economy
• Economics
• Gender studies
• Aesthetics
• Law and economics
• Neoclassical economics
• Engineering
• Economic growth
• Political economy
• History

Selected publications

• The University Geography Department as a Hub for Collaborative, Community-Based Storytelling

  Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2026-03-05

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• SNCC Cartoons as Counter-Mapping Black Futures: On Creative Cartographies of the Civil Rights Movement

  Cartographic Perspectives · 2026-02-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the mid-1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) created a series of educational comics. We argue these comics represent the melding of artistic geographies with an early form of GIScience, and thus push geography to include an expanded set of activities within its understanding of what constitutes GIScience. We argue these comics are a form of radical placemaking and represent how Black geographies are at the center of broad struggles for justice. By incorporating the knowledge of Black geographies within GIScience, we can extend our understanding of geography more broadly. This impacts our understanding of how political geography can center and be responsive to Black liberation struggles.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Come retribution: Revanchism, settler colonialism, and the geographical imagination of Donald Trump's America

  Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2025-08-11 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper analyzes Donald Trump's political rhetoric and strategy through the lens of revanchism, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. Focusing specifically on Trump's declared intent for retribution, it situates his discourse within a longstanding geographical imagination embedded in settler-colonial logics. The paper illustrates how this rhetoric intensifies existing social inequalities and fuels reactionary political movements that seek to reinforce traditional hierarchies of race, class, and gender, which are rooted in neoliberal restructuring. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples—from Confederate symbolism invoked by Trump's supporters to racialized conspiracies propagated during electoral campaigns—the paper's analysis calls for scholars and political actors to engage with the geographic imaginaries that sustain Trumpism. By illustrating the interconnections between settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and neoliberalism this research contributes to a broader understanding of the spatial dimensions of reactionary political movements, highlighting the necessity for confronting revanchist strategies and their implications for American democracy and society.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Black Geography

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Remapping the Legacy of Enslavement: Street Names, Stealth Stickers, and the Living Black Atlas

  Media and Communication · 2025-10-30 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article interprets the Stealth Slavery Sticker Campaign, a grassroots counter-mapping project led by the artist-activist collective Slavers of New York, as a chapter in the broader Living Black Atlas. Started during the racial reckoning of 2020, the campaign placed unauthorized stickers on street signs and other surfaces across Brooklyn to reveal suppressed histories of slavery embedded in commemorative place names. The stickers transformed daily encounters with taken-for-granted road names into unexpected opportunities to confront prominent historical families who profited from enslavement and to acknowledge the contributions of enslaved Africans in shaping the city. The collective framed their campaign as a “guerrilla educational” action that disrupted memorial landscapes, challenged discourses of white innocence, and provoked broader conversations about racial justice and accountability. At a time when official institutions are increasingly retreating from confronting racism, small, temporary interventions, such as these Stealth Stickers, can play a crucial role in encouraging critical audits of commemorative infrastructures, layering counter-narratives onto public spaces, fostering embodied confrontation with historical truths, and remaking everyday places through bold, unexpected acts of resistance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Concluding Thoughts: What Does It Mean to Do ‘Just’ Research?

  Policy Press eBooks · 2024-07-31

  book-chapterSenior author

  This chapter reflects on the volume’s contributions, recognizing the varied and contested ways we enact justice in our work and lives. Critically, this book does not represent a singular view of justice, but instead uses a plurality of perspectives to argue for a broad view of justice as praxis. What emerged from these diverse accounts were a common questioning of the purpose of the university, the role that a contemporary academic ought to play, the importance of context in determining our capability to do just research and the little-discussed emotional labour all research entails. The chapter develops a set of core elements for ‘best practice’ alongside a series of reflective questions that researchers can use to support engagement with just research as a messy and constant work-in-progress. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of being responsive to the dynamic, multidimensional and intersectional contextuality of research to make space for the reflexive and dialogical nature of justice.

  PublisherDOI

• The publishing process and getting your work into print

  2024-11-27

  book-chapterSenior author

  In this essay, we share information, advice, and experience to help you navigate the academic publishing process. We outline the publishing process and provide tips for getting your scholarship into print, with an emphasis on refereed journal articles. Each author then provides an individual’s narrative that describes their personal publishing strategies, along with tips for publishing within human geography, physical geography, and GIScience. Finally, we will touch upon the growing landscape of publishing popular academic pieces. We acknowledge that writing is at the crux of publishing, and its many nuances and strategies are treated separately in Chapter 17. As a Ph.D. student or early career academic, you embark on a long-term relationship with publishing. In this essay, we share information, advice, and experience to help you navigate the academic publishing process – from getting a single manuscript into print to strategizing publishing throughout your career. We first outline the publishing process and provide tips for getting your scholarship into print, emphasizing refereed journal articles. Each author then describes tips for strategizing publishing within the social sciences, physical/environmental sciences, and GIScience. Finally, we will touch upon the growing landscape of publishing popular academic pieces.

  PublisherDOI

• Concluding Thoughts: What Does It Mean to Do ‘Just’ Research?

  2024-07-31

  otherSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Black communities are using mapping to document and restore a sense of place

  2024-02-05 · 1 citations

  preprint1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The struggle against post-truth politics has always been about white supremacy: Lessons from the informational praxis of SNCC

  Environment and Planning C Politics and Space · 2024-09-18 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Exacerbated but by no means invented by President Donald Trump, post-truth politics are defined as a disregard for facts in political discourse and policymaking. The post-truth era is dominated by two forms of informational praxis: misinformation and disinformation. Through the archival record of civil rights organizations, we argue we should not see the present era of post-truth politics as new but instead see it as part of a more prolonged struggle over white supremacy and the broader effort to contain challenges to the US economic and racial order. By contextualizing the geography of post-truth politics, the strategies and tactics civil rights groups use to counter white supremacist lies are important to understand, especially in an era where social media can spread lies and disinformation at lightning-quick speed. Thus, we also explore how civil rights organizations challenged disinformation and the control and suppression of information perpetuated by those in power.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Geospatial Intelligence, and Civil Rights

  NSF · $374k · 2017–2023

• Righting Unrightable Wrongs: Legacies of Racial Violence in the U.S. South

  NSF · $165k · 2010–2015

Frequent coauthors

• Derek H. Alderman

  University of Tennessee at Knoxville

  29 shared

• James A. Tyner

  Kent State University

  6 shared

• Agatha Herman

  5 shared

• Anne Bonds

  4 shared

• Deborah G. Martin

  Clark University

  2 shared

• Melanie Barron

  2 shared

• Maria Lewicka

  Nicolaus Copernicus University

  1 shared

• Jennifer D. Adams

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Geography

  University of Georgia

  2007