GROUP 2: Jason, Anna, Blake, Manú, Cate, Erin, Jessie
LAB: This week Emily will prepare three short video lessons, tailored to address a variety of your shared interests. You’ll watch these independently during class, and then we’ll reconvene for short discussions about each of those topics.
Change of plans: We will use the remaining time in class for 1-on-1/group consultations and questions depending on people’s atlas progress. Emily and Shannon will stick around for the remainder of class after the presentation.
TO PREPARE FOR CLASS:
In preparation for the group’s activity:
- Please come to class with one image. Here are the specifications:
- We would like it to be a screenshot of Google Maps (please use the Satellite View) of your current geographic location -OR- a geographic location that is significant to you. Feel free to zoom in / zoom out to your heart’s content.
- Your image needs to be cropped into a square. Use whatever program you’d like to achieve that (Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Preview, etc.)
- Have your image accessible for class. We’ll be using all of them for our breakout activity. If you have any questions between now and tomorrow night, feel free to reach anyone from Group 2!
For Blake:
- Lucas LaRochelle, “Queering the Map: On Designing Digital Queer Space,” YouTube. Guggenheim Museum (2021): watch 14:30–18:45 (though I highly recommend the entire lecture!).
- Also, please spend time engaging with Queering the Map by reading the stories and experiences shared on the platform. I encourage exploring pins dropped in unexpected places.
For Erin:
- Janet Vertesi, “Image Processing: Drawing As and its Consequences,” in Seeing Like a Rover (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015): 73-104.
- Don’t be scared about the page count; there are lots of pictures!
- Or maybe you could read Daegan Miller’s “Earthward,” Places Journal (July 2020).
For Manú:
- Regner Ramos “San Juan Queer Mobile Apps, Urban Spaces, and LGBTQ Identities” in Regner Ramos and Sharif Mowlabocus, eds., Queer Sites in Global Contexts: Technologies, Spaces, and Otherness (Routledge, 2010).
- For those interested in Blake’s link to Queering the Map, Chapter 8 of the book discusses the project further.
- Explore the Instagram account of Ramos’ Cuirtopia project, particularly the captions on the photos.
For Jessie
- Margot Boyer-Dry, “He Honors Black New Yorkers. Not All Black Activists Are Thrilled,” New York Times (March 5, 2021) (Thanks Shannon for the recommendation!)
- Derek Sivers’s blog post, Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers (June 22, 2009).
For Cate:
- Please watch: Caroline Sturdy Colls & Forensic Architecture, “Living Death Camp,” Forensic Architecture (2013). Feel free to read through the written project overview if you like, but it’s the short documentary video that I’d like you all to engage.
- Further recommended reading: if the above documentary piques your interest, you may enjoy this excellent article on temporality, sociality and grave excavation: Shannon A. Novak, “Corporeal Congregations and Asychronous Lives: Unpacking the Pews at Spring Street,” American Anthropologist, 119:2 (2017): 236-252.
For Jason:
- Choose your own introduction to Schafran, Smith and Hall’s The Spatial Contract: read one of the intro chapters from the book, explore the concept cheat-sheet in the linked reader, or watch a longer conversation about the topic with one of the authors and New School faculty (plus some other familiar faces…).
- Additional recommended reading:
- Jeff Hitchcock and Charley Flint, Decentering Whiteness for an interesting social application of conversation-changing techniques.
- Camilla Hawthorne, Black Matters are Spatial Matters: Black geographies for the twenty‐first century for an introduction/citation compendium of core black geography literature.
- Additional recommended reading:
For Anna:
- Watch Adam Khalil and Zach Khalil. The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (2017).
- Additional recommending reading:
- Sasha Costanza-Chock, Introduction, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020)
- Skim this article that offers language for a widespread problem: Lisa Nakamura, “Feeling Good about Feeling Bad: Virtuous Virtual Reality and the Automation of Racial Empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19:1 (April 2020): 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259.
- An article that will make you question/confront your own research methodology: Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Decolonising Research Methodology Must Include Undoing Its Dirty History,” The Conversation (September 26, 2017).
- Read the intro of this incredible book that shows how mapping is part of the embodied colonial performance: Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).