Mapping Otherwise
Mapping as a Caring Practice looks for the practices and narratives of how other ways of mapmaking are bending our conceptions of spaces by the paradigms of counter-maps, decolonization, and caring. It prioritizes acts of empathy, storytelling and situated perspectives on places and territories. The class is a reasarch on how to use data visualizaiton, interactive maps, and map narratives to address issues that cartographically alter issues that matter in the world.
In the present world of increased inequality, migration, and environmental crises, the power and agency of maps are expanding. Maps have the power to make the invisible visible and the visible disputable. The agency of maps and geographic visualizations acquire roles that reveal invisible relationships, surface unspoken inequities, and produce new ways of seeing, navigating, and acting within spatial happenings. Changing the way we produce maps in turn changes the information transmitted among socio-political and socio-natural communities. As the history of mapping charted space majorly using colonial tools (such as apparatuses of surveillance, control, and colonization) this course looks for the theories and practices of how other ways of mapmaking are bending our conceptions of narrating spaces by focusing on mapping under
the new paradigms od counter-maps, in particular caregiving. Mapping as a caring practice prioritizes acts of empathy, storytelling, community engagement, and spatial advocacy by using new technologies emergent in cartography and design. We will explore and speculate on urban and extra urban contexts and manifest a new ground for mapping as a caring practice.
Student Works:
Northeastern Universiy College of Arts Media and Design, Fall 2023
ARTG 6330 Information Design Mapping Strategies as “Mapping Otherwise: Mapping as a Caring Practice”
Instructor: Gökçen Erklılıç, PhD.
Student Projects:
Uroboros: Designed to Make an Impression. Low Leasing.
A Counter Neoliberal Mapping of Boston Seaport District by Nick Pietrinferno.
Mapping Segregation Geographies of Homeless Street Dwelling in Seattle by Yuhan Jiang.
How Hong Kong is preparing for a resilient future by building coral reefs and forging sustainable development of marine ecology by Jiayi Hao.
Fantastic Beasts in Boston – and where to find them
A mapping project for locating the wildlife habitats and navigating to them by Shuang Jiang.
Mapping the base of the Mexican economy and informal labor in the bazaar networks by Daniela Galvez Vidal.
