Selected Publications
Eternal Chattel? or, how to live in a moveable house when liberal time isn’t enough. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. LINK
Tourism, Terraforming and the Transitional State: Contesting Coastal Futures in Jamaica. Local Environment. LINK (in proofs)
Capture Land as Abolition Geography: The Mutuality of Placemaking and Flight. Special Issue: Desirable Futures. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. LINK
What Lies Here, beyond Boundary? Themed Section: Postnationalism Prefigured @20. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. 73(3): 76–82 LINK
What does Capital Consume? Racial Capitalism and the Social Reproduction of Surplus People. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. OnlineFirst. LINK
Reproducing the Plot: Making Life in the Shadow of Premature Death. Special Issue: Outside the Wage. Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography. 55(4): 985-1295. LINK
Capture Land: Anti-Squatting Policy as Processual Land Grab in Jamaica. In Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing. Andreas Neef, Chanrith Ngin, Tsegaye Moreda, and Sharlene Mollett, editors. 65-80. New York: Routledge. LINK
infrastructure at the edge of the “formal”
SELECTED invited PresentationS
2026. Invited Talk, with Marcus Goffe. The Terraqueous Caribbean and the Dichotomous Dispossession from Land and Water. University of Toronto Study Abroad Course led by Kamari Maxine Clarke. Antigua.
2025. Invited Scholar. Abolition Internationalism Conference. University of Cape Town.
2025. Invited Paper. Treaties, Titles & Licenses: Legitimacy and Four-footed People. Community Town Hall on Maroon Lands. Charlestown Maroons Conference and Festival. Charlestown, Jamaica.
2024. Invited Panelist. Our Land: Securing Collective Futures in Self-Built Communities. Capturelands forum, Island City Lab.
2024. Invited Paper. Land as Property / Land Beyond Property. Center for Place Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center, and The People’s Forum.
2022. Panelist and Chair. Black Geographies, Racial Capitalism and the Caribbean. With Beverley Mullings and Melanie Newton. Intersections Series [Colloquium]. Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto.
2022. Invited Paper. Symposium on Charles Carnegie’s Post-nationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands. University of Virginia.
2022. Invited Paper. Jamaican Chattel Houses & the Historical Presence of Precarious Tenure. Architectural Histories of the Greater Caribbean. University of Texas at Austin. (virtual)
2022. Invited Panelist. PLANTATION AFTER/LIVES: Roots, Routes, and Relations. Symposium hosted by Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies. University of Texas at Austin. (virtual)
2022. Introduction. Author Meets Critics session for Urbanism Without Guarantees by Christian Anderson. Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers. (virtual)
2021. Invited Talk. Plot as Freedom Practice. Making Space lecture series. School of Urban Planning, McGill University. (virtual)
2021. Invited Paper. Author Meets Critic session for Scammer’s Yard by Jovan Scott Lewis. Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers. (virtual)
2020. Invited Paper. Michael Baptista Lecture Series: Fly Me to the Moon: Imagining a Future Beyond Extraction. Centre for Research on Latin American and the Caribbean. York University. (virtual)
2019. Invited Talk. Disciplining Space. Department of Architecture, Tyler School of Art. Temple University.
an instrument for recollection [remembering, regathering, recuperating] architectural thesis
About
Rachel Goffe is a geographer and a licensed architect, working at the intersections of place-making, livelihood and the state regulation of space. Broadly, her research aims to understand transformations of the postcolonial state by examining the shifting boundaries between formal and informal relationships to land and livelihood. Her fieldwork focuses on the encounter between recent policy to curtail squatting and traditions of Black life that emerged through durable yet insecure possession of small parcels of land in Jamaica, where she is from originally. Dr. Goffe earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Temple University and a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is Assistant Professor at University of Toronto in the Departments of Human Geography (UTSC), Geography and Planning, and affiliate of the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and the Center for Caribbean Studies, both at University of Toronto.