raging against the machine Natalie Correa, University of Wisconsin-Madison Raechel Portelli, University of Illinois Alicia Iverson, Penn State Generative AI tools can now produce maps in seconds. As automated workflows become the default path from data to map, we question what the future of cartographic practice looks like. Drawing on humanistic geography, feminist epistemology, and critical cartography, we will engage with creative and embodied methods—hand-drawn annotation, fieldwork sketching, tactile design, participatory mapping—as ways to explore what is at stake when the cartographer’s body, judgment, and creative process are removed from the act of mapping. Through these non-digital methods and group discussion, we will foreground positionality and make visible the interpretive labor algorithmic cartography tends to obscure.
Thursday October 22, 2026 2:00pm - 3:40pm CDT Commons