Derek H Alderman

University of Tennessee Knoxville, Geography, Faculty Member

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I am a cultural and historical geographer interested in public memory, popular culture, and heritage tourism in the U.S. South Much of my work focuses on the rights of African Americans to claim the power to commemorate the past and shape cultural landscapes as part of a broader goal of social and spatial justice.

My work has spanned many aspects of the southern landscape, including Civil Rights memorials (esp. streets named for Dr. King), slavery and plantation heritage tourism sites, NASCAR, Graceland and Memphis, Mayberry and film tourism, and even the cultural geography of kudzu.

In August of 2012, I proudly joined the faculty at Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville after serving at East Carolina University since 2000. I also held a tenure-track position at Georgia College (1998-2000), a visiting position at Georgia Southern University (1995-1996), and temporary faculty/graduate teaching positions at the University of Georgia (1990-1998).

I am a devoted scholar-teacher who enjoys working and publishing with students, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I am also committed to conducting critical public scholarship that engages, informs, and helps the news media, government officials, community activists and organizations, and the broader citizenry.

I founded and co-coordinate the RESET (Race, Ethnicity, and Social Equity in Tourism) Initiative and recently served on the Council of the Association of American Geographers as Regional Councillor (representing the Southeast) and Chair of the Publications Committee. I am a former President of the Southeastern Division of the AAG and currently serve as Vice President-Elect of the American Association of Geographers.
Supervisors: Kavita Pandit (for MA) and Andrew Herod (for PhD)
Phone: Office: 1-865-974-0406
Address: Department of Geography
University of Tennessee
304C Burchfiel Geography Building
Knoxville, TN 37996-0925
[email protected]
https://twitter.com/MLKStreet

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Books by Derek H Alderman

Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum

The Political Life Of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place. Edited by Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, and. Maoz Azaryahu xxii and 334 pp.: maps, ills. bibliog. index. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2018. $140.00 (hardcover), isbn 9781472475091

Geographical Review

Cities are, among other things, especially dense concentrations of streets, avenues, and other co... more Cities are, among other things, especially dense concentrations of streets, avenues, and other corridors of movement. Streets serve as the equivalent of a skeletal system that structures urban form while simultaneously framing movement and interaction through space. In fact, we commonly visualize, and simultaneously simplify, the city as a system of interconnected streets. These street maps, whether manifesting in physical, electronic, and mental forms, shape how we interact, imagine, and move through the urban landscape. Our ability to navigate is greatly enhanced by giving streets individualized names. Those names also provide a common frame of reference for communication with others, most obviously when giving directions. Combined with house or building numbers to create addresses, street names provide a basic framework for locating places in relation to other places and constitute ubiquitous but often overlooked infrastructural component of modern cities. Like other toponyms, street names appear superficially to function as mere spatial referents that identify and distinguish a particular street from other streets. A street’s name may also describe some distinguishing attribute and trait, such as a street lined with oak trees may be named Oak Street. In such cases, the process of naming streets appears relatively straightforward and hardly cause for controversy. Yet the process of street naming is inherently political and reflects the unequal distribution of social and economic capital. For example, it is common for street names to honor individuals, but that immediately raises a number of questions. What criteria will be used to judge which individuals are worthy of such an honor, for example, or which street is best suited to bear that person’s name? These questions are sorted out through political processes that invariably expose differences of opinion tied to competing values, beliefs, and priorities. Human geographers and cognate scientists have investigated the politics of street naming in a variety of geographical, historical, and social contexts, and in doing so, they have contributed to the burgeoning field of critical toponymy, or the critical study of place-naming processes. The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place, edited by Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu, provides a broad and insightful overview of contemporary toponymic research by bringing together case studies from scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Collectively, the volume demonstrates that “the urban streetscape is a space where

The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes : Naming, Politics, and Place

e-space (Manchester Metropolitan University), Jul 6, 2017

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The Geography Teacher Special Issue: NEH Institute on Black Geographies of Mobility

The Geography Teacher, 2024

In July of 2022, the University of Tennessee and the Tennessee Geographic Alliance hosted a three... more In July of 2022, the University of Tennessee and the Tennessee Geographic Alliance hosted a three-week summer institute funded by the National Endowment for Humanities. Eighteen K-12 educators from across the country came to Knoxville to explore "The Role of Geographic Mobility in the African American Freedom Struggle. " The institute focused on Movement as one of geography's five fundamental themes and highlighted the central role that migration, transportation, and travel and tourism have played in maintaining structural racism and facilitating Black antiracist resistance, self-determination, and world-making across multiple scales and historical periods. A special issue of the Geography Teacher journal was organized to disseminate the results of that institute in terms of a summary of activities, content and themes, and lesson ideas and plans. This special issue consists of five articles packaged in a single file here to assist educators.

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The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes Naming, Politics, and Place

by Derek H Alderman and Reuben Rose-Redwood

Over the past few decades, a rich body of critical scholarship has explored the politics of urban... more Over the past few decades, a rich body of critical scholarship has explored the politics of urban toponymy, and the present collection brings together the works of geographers, anthropologists, historians, linguists, planners, and political scientists to examine the power of street naming as an urban place-making practice. Covering a wide range of case studies from cities in Europe, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, the contributions to this edited volume (published by Routledge) illustrate how the naming of streets has been instrumental to the reshaping of urban spatial imaginaries and the cultural politics of place.

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Civil Rights Memorials and The Geography of Memory

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Papers by Derek H Alderman

Reconciliation in Place Names: Why Principled Frameworks Always Matter, But Especially Now at this Political Moment

by Derek H Alderman and Christine K. Johnson

Park Stewardship Forum, 2026

This article examines the urgent need for principled frameworks to guide place-name reconciliatio... more This article examines the urgent need for principled frameworks to guide place-name reconciliation in the United States, particularly amid the growing politicization and weaponization of geographic naming. Drawing on the work of the Federal Advisory Committee on Reconciliation in Place Names, established through Secretarial Order 3405, we argue that derogatory place names are not merely outdated labels but enduring markers of colonialism, racism, sexism, and exclusion that can inflict social and psychological harm on marginalized communities. The article highlights the committee’s development of Place Name Reconciliation: Guiding Visions and Principles, a framework approved in June 2024 that defines reconciliation as participatory, research-driven, reparative, educational, and accountable to communities most affected by naming harms. Although the committee was dissolved in 2025, its principles remain vital for resisting top-down, partisan, and revanchist renaming practices. Ultimately, place-name reconciliation is presented as a democratic and ethical process for aligning public landscapes with values of truth, justice, dignity, and belonging.

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Bringing The Conversation into the Geography Classroom: Public Storytelling as Authentic Learning

by Derek H Alderman and Seth Kannarr

The Professional Geographer, 2026

Public storytelling is increasingly important for geographers as higher education faces increased... more Public storytelling is increasingly important for geographers as higher education faces increased scrutiny, politicized attacks on truth-telling, and pressure to show broader relevance. This article argues for integrating more public-facing science communication into geographic education and introduces The Conversation as a classroom tool. A vehicle for university scholar-driven explanatory journalism, The Conversation publishes short, open-access articles that demonstrate the value of
academic insights to real-world issues. Based on our experiences teaching with and contributing to the platform, we created two classroom exercises aligned with an authentic learning framework. First, curated articles from The Conversation
serve as authentic class content, enabling students to evaluate how university scholars apply disciplinary ideas to contemporary problems; how knowledge is produced, translated, and evidenced for broader audiences; and whose perspectives are included (or missing) within stories. Second, the media outlet serves as an authentic practice space where students simulate writing in The Conversation style, from pitching and drafting to receiving feedback and revising an explainer article for general audiences. These classroom activities invite educators and students to address the rewards, challenges, and ethics of science communication, as well as the practical skills, cognitive and emotional labor, and power relations embedded in
The Conversation’s expert-centered storytelling.

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

Cartographic Perspectives, 2026

In the mid-1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) created a series of educat... more 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.

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

by Joshua Inwood and Derek H Alderman

Media and Communication, 2025

This article interprets the Stealth Slavery Sticker Campaign, a grassroots counter-mapping projec... more 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.