Papers Session: Marginal Geographies in Space Place and Religion
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
This paper examines the 1978 police raid of the West Philadelphia headquarters of MOVE, a Black radical religious organization, as a clash of competing spatial imaginations. Tracing the conflict between the secular spatial imaginary of Philadelphia’s carceral governance and MOVE’s insurgent approach to cultivating sacred space, I demonstrate the secular spatial logic encoded in zoning laws and their carceral enforcement by analyzing MOVE’s metaphysical reordering of urban space as a direct challenge to secular spatial order.