Category: In conversation

Water and time, Summer 2026

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Walk, Talk & Connect,
with the Cooksville SNAP of the
Credit Valley Conservation Authority

Saturday, 22 August 2026 | 9:00 a.m. | John C. Price Playground. Register here

Join CVC’s Cooksville SNAP team alongside Kenneth and Moneira, local Cooksville residents and avid nature lovers, for a family-friendly walk along Cooksville Creek. Let’s have conversations about what brings us (humans, nonhumans, ancestors and future kin), together. Let’s talk about about portals to an alternate, actually-existing Mississauga, about inhabiting a place, and about nature.

This is a shorter, all-ages friendly, late-summer version of a Jane’s Walk that we have been conducting for two years, and hope to run for as long as we are your neighbours.

This event is part of the Cooksville Sustainable Actions Neighbourhood Plan (SNAP) and everyone is welcome to join, whether you live, work or play in Cooksville (or beyond)!

Meet us at the Little John Lane entrance to John C. Price Park. We encourage you to walk, roll, or take transit to the event. Parking is available along Kirwin Avenue. Please pay attention to road signs.

Noticing possibility in Mississauga City Centre

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

A Jane’s Walk with Jes F and Rahul M of Sustain Sauga

Saturday, 2 May 2026 | 12:00 p.m. | Contemplating Child sculpture, Community Common Park, 34 Princess Royal Drive at Living Arts Drive

Mississauga City Centre is a “vertical suburb around a mall”, a “triumph of bad policy over logic”. Its own mayor calls it “boring”. These may all ring true, especially from behind a windshield or an infinite scroll.

But what truths might exist alongside these portrayals—truths that might help realize a more livable, more neighbourly community? 

This walk is about the art of paying attention to possibility in Mississauga City Centre: possibility as it actually exists, as it waits for a slight nudge, and as it speaks to challenges faced by North American suburbs seeking to transition away from car dependency. It will feature conviviality in lesser-known parks and side streets, buried creeks waiting to be daylighted, and public facilities with the potential for civic activation.

A section of the walk will be devoted to Community Commons Park and the Living Arts Centre: two unique public spaces that are decried as “underutilized” by the present mayor and targeted for a $4 billion redevelopment. Another section of the walk will feature civic spaces around Celebration Square: as they have been variously transformed for the better, closed off or hidden from the public, or wait for people and government to take pride in these places.

Continue reading “Noticing possibility in Mississauga City Centre” →

Empire as insular, unsophisticated, incoherent

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Commentary on Scott Kirsch’s American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire

At the 2025 AAG Meeting in Detroit, I was part of an author meets readers panel for Scott Kirsch’s American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire.

The panel was organized by Christian C. Lentz, Michael Hawkins, and Joseph Palis, and included commentary from Kristian Saguin, Mona Domosh, Don Mitchell, and myself.

A version of our comments was published in September 2025 for the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. What follows is my original unabridged commentary.

Let me begin by making a distinction between the violence and injustice of American imperialism on one hand, and its sophistication, coherence, and success on the other. Though at perpetual risk of erasure, the evidence for the former in the Philippines is plentiful. But this is not necessarily evidence of a total, nor monolithic, nor coherent project.

To resist the erasure of American imperialism, and to understand its ongoing legacies, it is important not to ascribe to it more power than it could actually muster. We could instead name its weaknesses and contradictions, through finer-grained close studies, and show just how vain, incomplete, and unsuccessful its schemes are. And what better way to do this than to study Great Men and their Grand Designs, at the height of their hubris?

Continue reading “Empire as insular, unsophisticated, incoherent” →