Lapworth Lecture - How to have a (decolonial) rock in the family: questioning geology, race and empire

Join us for a special Lapworth Lecture as part of Black History Month with Professor Kathryn Yusoff.

How to have a (decolonial) rock in the family: questioning geology, race and empire

Posed through the proposition of “how to have a rock in the family” this talk will discuss geology’s origins as a discipline that produced historical narratives of both the earth and race. Within the context of colonial extraction, who and what was kin shaped Black and Indigenous geographies of subjugation. Revisiting histories of geology with the help of NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and the environmental tactics of anticolonial freedom movements, Kathryn asks how might a different set of geostories of the inhuman counter colonial hierarchies and extractive norms? How can the consideration of the restitution of geologic museum collections open wider narratives of obligations to the earth that counter racial inequities?

About Professor Kathryn Yusoff

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interrogates geologies of race, questions of environment and extraction and the afterlives of colonial power. She is author of Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (2024), A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2019) and co-author of Planetary Portals (2026). She represented Britain at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 as a co-curator of GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair.