This week we’ll examine cases of applied, activist, and radical cartography that are conscious and critical of their own cartographic limitations. We’ll also talk about multivocal, multimodal “deep” mapping practices.
TODAY’S AGENDA:
- Discuss Project Proposals, Due Friday
- Map Critiques #2: Amina, Ripley, Manú, Ashley
- Reading Discussion
- Map Lab #2 with Emily: Cognitive Mapping / Critical Cartography Exercise: We’ll be thinking about what critical cartography and counter-mapping techniques might be able to bring to your own work. Come prepared with a general topic for some low-tech pen + paper mapping, (perhaps the one you are interested in using for your semester atlas project). We’ll start the class thinking about what makes counter-mapping techniques counter at all and how those ideas might help you find new conceptual avenues to explore.
TO PREPARE FOR TODAY:
- The coining of “counter-mapping”: Nancy Lee Peluso, “Whose Woods Are These? Counter-Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia,” Antipode 27:4 (1995): 383-406 [recall that you’ll be prompted to log in to access copyrighted materials] [Supplemental: Jeremy Crampton and John Krygier map the critical cartographic terrain and trace its genealogy in “An Introduction to Critical Cartography,” ACME 4:1 (2005)].
- Yet counter-mapping was taking place before the term existed: Dee Morris & Stephen Voyce, “William Bunge, the DGEI, & Radical Cartography,” Jacket 2 (March 20, 2015).
- Skim through William Bunge, Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (Schenkman, 1971).
- Skim through a few other projects of your choice:
- Aimi Hamraie’s Mapping Accessibility project: About + Methodology.
- The amazing Anti-Eviction Mapping Project [their book, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance, will be published by PM Press in May!].
- Sarah Bond, “How Is Digital Mapping Changing the Way We Visualize Racism and Segregation?” Forbes (October 20, 2017).
- Check out the various “Mapping Racial Violence” projects featured at this 2019 “Radical Cartography” conference at Brown.
- Bureau d’Etudes (related: Mark Lombardi, William Powhida)
- Center for Spatial Research / Laura Kurgan
- Dongsei Kim’s “The First Iteration,” SITE Magazine (2016) [a critical mapping project examining the Korean DMZ].
- Iconoclasistas: collective mapping focusing on territorial activism + institutional critique
- Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, and Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama.
- Kollektiv Orangotango, eds., This Is Not an Atlas (Columbia University Press, 2019) [you might also want to check out their keynote at the Shifts in Mapping conference, Basel, January 20, 2021].
- Wonyoung So’s work [full disclosure: I co-advised his brilliant MA thesis 🙂 ].
- Bo Zhao, et. al., Global Refugee Atlas.
- Anna Tsing et. al.’s Feral Atlas; more here, at this January 30, 2021, Guggenheim conference, at 33:53; and here @ the 48-minute mark.
- Related: Iman Datoo’s “Kinnomic Botany”
- Recommended Listening: Dawn of Midi, “Atlas”
Supplemental Resources:
- Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier, “An Introduction to Critical Cartography,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4:1 (2006): 11-33.
- Craig Dalton and Jim Thatcher, “Checking in on Critical Cartography: New Directions and Openings, What Work Remains, and How We Might Pursue It,” Cartographic Perspectives (November 2019).
- Siddharth Peter de Souza, Nida Rehman, and Saba Sharma, eds., Crowdsourcing, Constructing, and Collaborating: Methods and Social Impacts of Mapping the World Today (Bloomsbury, 2020): Environmental Justice Atlas, HarassMap, I Paid A Bribe, Intolerance Tracker, the Humanitarian Tracker, Torn Apart/Separados, and Placing Segregation [full disclosure: I wrote the afterword; it’s a good book!].
- Raphael Tsavkko Garcia, “In Rio, Mapping Gunshots Can Backfire,” CityLab (September 29, 2020).
- *GRAIN, “Digital Fences: The Financial Enclosure of Farmlands in South America,” GRAIN (September 21, 2020) + summary tweet.
- Shannon Mattern, “Post-It Note City,” Places Journal (February 2020).
- Missing Maps.
- Lize Mogel & Alexis Bhagat, Eds., An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Los Angeles: The Journal of Aesthetics Protest Press, 2008).
- Paulo Tavares’s work (particularly how it speaks to Peluso’s)
- Alberto Toscano & Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Washington, D.C.: Zero Books, 2015) [with companion website].
- There is SO MUCH STUFF I could list here; I have to make myself stop.
On Deep Mapping:
- Ian Biggs, “Deep Mapping as an ‘Essaying’ of Place,” Presented at “Writing” Seminar, Bartlett School of Architecture; reprinted on IanBiggs [blog post] (July 9, 2010).
- Eve Blau and Bobby Pietrusko, “Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative,” Harvard Graduate School of Design, September 7, 2018.
- David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, Eds., Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015).
- Martin Dodge, “Cartography I: Mapping Deeply, Mapping the Past,” Progress in Human Geography 41:1 (2017): 1-10.
- Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon & Clara Wong, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook (ORO Editions, 2012).
- William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth (1991).
- Shannon Mattern, Deep Mapping the Media City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
- Robert Macfarlane’s books!
- Richard McGuire, HERE (Pantheon, 2014).
- Megan Prelinger, Rick Prelinger and Stacy Kozakavich’s series of fabulous atlases for the Bay Observatory in San Francisco.
- Todd Presner, David Shepard & Yoh Kawano, HyperCites: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press / metaLab Projects, 2014);
- Les Roberts, “Deep Mapping and Spatial Anthropology,” Humanities 5:1 (2016).
- Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, [2010] 2013): 109-190 [on photographic and filmic mapping in the VSB Yale Studio];
- Karen E. Till, Ed., Mapping Spectral Traces [exhibition catalog] (Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, 2010).
- Chris Ware.
On Wm Bunge and DGEI:
- Linda Campbell, Andrew Newman & Sara Safransky’s “Uniting Detroiters” project, inspired by Bunge.
- The DGEI Field Notes @ Antipode, as well as papers from a symposium reflecting on those notes (see especially Jim Thatcher’s).
- Kate Hartman, “The New Geographers: How Detroiters are Mapping a Better Future for the City,” Model D (March 10,2015).Andy Merrifield, “Situated Knowledge Through Exploration: Reflections on Bunge’s ‘Geographical Expeditions,” Antipode 27:1 (January 1995).
- MIT Center for Civic Media on The Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute; a collection of Bunge maps on Detroitography.
- Gwendlyn Warren and Cindi Katz (2014) < video: 1:18:29 > (Note from Emily: this is worth a watch if you have the interest and the time. Gwendolyn Warren’s first-hand perspective adds so much to the more-recently resurfaced narratives around Bunge and the DGEI.).