Week 5: Tuesday, February 16: MAPPING (IN) THE FIELD… TO CHANGE IT: CRITICAL CARTOGRAPHY

Iconoclasistas, ¿A quién pertenece la tierra?

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: 

Wongyoung So, Cartographers of North Korea

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: