Mapping as Close Reading: Visualizing Abolition Geographies in Speculative Fiction brianna sas-pérez, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee What if we use mapping, not just text, to represent findings from a close reading? I experiment with this methodological question through a counter-mapping of the Robledo neighborhood in Octavia Butler's (1993) Parable of the Sower. Thinking with abolition geography and Gilmore's "freedom as a place" (2017), I treat Butler's imagination and fictional worlds as cartographic data. Using layered, hand-drawn mapping techniques, I make visible how communities create safety through everyday spatial practice.
Other Worlds Are Possible: Fantasy world building as the basis for imagining hopeful futures in the classroom Christopher Fowler, Penn State University Students increasingly treat higher education as credentialing, while the wider culture struggles to imagine futures meaningfully better than the present. This talk argues that cartographic world building — the disciplined invention of physical geographies, climates, hydrologies, settlement systems, and trade networks for places that do not exist — offers a generative response to both crises. Drawing on EART-H, a procedurally modeled fantasy world built in R and deployed as an open Quarto book and tabletop campaign, I show how making maps for impossible places trains students to treat institutions as contingent, place-specific, and genuinely revisable.
Toward a Mapping of the Superhero Genre James Tyner, Department of Geography, Kent State University Metropolis. Gotham City. Hell’s Kitchen. Wakanda. For some people, these places hold little or no meaning. But for those invested in the superhero genre, these names conjure images of heroic exploits where superpowered characters do battle with other superpowered characters. Similar to other genre, the superhero genre is intimately place bound and several characters manifest a profound place-attachment. In this presentation I provide some tentative first steps. First, I provide a broad overview of maps in the superhero genre. Second, I provide a framework for a narrative mapping of superhero narratives, with special attention directed toward a mainstay of the genre, that is the hero’s journey.
Evaluating Research on the History of Maps in Mysteries Judith Tyner, Professor emerita, California State University, Long Beach Maps have been included in mystery novels for over 100 years and yet there has been little analysis of them. Chapters in books on maps in literature often ignore mystery fiction or discuss one or two authors, mostly from the ‘golden age’; some articles list books that contain maps, but there is no real history or analysis of the maps or even identification of their makers. Articles talk about which books contain maps, and often equate floor plans with maps, they do not discuss the style of the maps or their authors. In this presentation I look at the literature of maps in mystery fiction, examine and evaluate this research.
Friday October 23, 2026 9:00am - 10:20am CDT Room 2
