april l. graham-jackson gives an annual geography lecture

Mount Holyoke College alum april l. graham-jackson ’18 and her husband, University of Massachusetts Amherst alum Roderick E. Jackson ’19, were the guests of honor for the Geology & Geography department’s annual and classroom lectures. Serin Houston, associate professor of geography and international relations, invited graham-jackson to give the virtual lectures graham-jackson said she was honored by the request and was eager to return to Mount Holyoke.

“I enjoyed talking to my Mount Holyoke siblings and letting them know that this is what you can do with geography,” graham-jackson said.

graham-jackson gave a lecture to the GEOG-261CT Collaborative Research Experience: ‘Cities’ class at Mount Holyoke. Titled “Deconstructing Still Sweatin’ … Placemaking in the Black House Music and Cultural Community of Chicago,” the lecture elaborated on the senior thesis she wrote during her time as a Mount Holyoke student.

By delving into the geographies of house music and house culture in Chicago and the placemaking practices of the Black house music and cultural community of Chicago, graham-jackson wanted to correct the misconception that house is just a form of music and not a culture.

“[The Black house community in Chicago] created house music and house culture, but they also created what I called house geographies,” graham-jackson explained. “They took back spaces that had been left behind after economic destruction and turned them into spaces for love, for joy, for Black people and [for] LGBTQIA persons to come together.”

House culture brought kids out of their neighborhoods and took them to places they had never heard of before because of the racial segregation present in Chicago.

graham-jackson is passionate about developing a geographic understanding of Black life in Chicago. Having received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) in 2024, she is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and a research fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies. She is also writing her first book, which focuses on Black suburban settlements in the South Suburbs of Chicago.

graham-jackson also gave the annual lecture with her husband, who is currently a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, titled “Black Chicagoland Is …”

This lecture discussed the public humanities initiative graham-jackson and her husband have been working on to highlight the depth of Black placemaking in the Chicago metropolitan area.

“We take photography, music, sound, acoustic ecologies, and community cartography to create a new map of Chicagoland that is more representative of Blackness and Black life here from a historical perspective up to our contemporary moment,” she said.

graham-jackson enjoyed sharing this long-term project, as very few people know the full depth of Black life across the Chicago metropolitan area. She was also excited to lecture at Mount Holyoke because of her connection with Houston, who has been her mentor since her time at MHC.

“I call Serin my geography mom because she was the one [who] introduced me to geography when I was at Mount Holyoke,” she said. “After her class, we would walk back to her office, and she would spend hours in her office giving me different books to read.”

With Houston’s guidance and support, graham-jackson fell in love with geography. graham-jackson came to MHC as a Francis Perkins Scholar, and it took her a while to find her major. After she’d switched several times, her advisor, Preston H. Smith, suggested she try geography.

“He said, ‘You speak like a geographer, you talk about geographic things, but I don’t think anyone has told you that it is geography you’re discussing,’” graham-jackson said.

She was initially resistant to the idea because she thought geography was only about maps, but she reluctantly agreed to take Houston’s World Regional Geography class. On her first day in the classroom, she realized Smith had been right.

“Something in my stomach dropped, my heart started racing and I started crying,” graham-jackson said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is it.’”

graham-jackson was extremely grateful that Smith had taken the time to really listen to her and help her find her major.

“This is why MHC is such an extraordinary institution; it’s because the professors there are so unbelievably elite,” she said. “It’s beyond their accolades, their publishing record, their education, their background; it’s because they have time to sit with their students enough to get to know them, to be able to identify what they’re saying without them saying it.”

After deciding on geography as a major, graham-jackson continued to dig into the subject, and she soon realized that it was a good fit. However, she desired more from it, as she wanted to tackle race and gender as well as other ideas that would connect her with her hometown of Chicago.

Houston introduced her to Black Geographies, a subdiscipline of geography. graham-jackson then created a major and graduated with the first-ever black geographies degree.

Now, graham-jackson has been able to return (virtually) to Mount Holyoke to share the knowledge she gained at MHC and in her studies since.