Law, Organizing, and Cartography
Lucy Roberts-Widdison, Harriet Tubman Fellow, Coalition for Property Tax Justice
Modern spatial data practices create, perpetuate, and exacerbate racial differences in housing outcomes. For example, in the majority-Black city of Detroit, 1 in 4 of the lowest value homes have been illegally foreclosed since 2009 because of spatial interpolation methods that ignore the majority of residential sales. In Milwaukee, utility and zoning tickets similarly result in grim property foreclosure rates. This presentation explores the role cartographers can play in illuminating and dismantling racist policies, drawing on the Institute for Law and Organizing’s decade of community organizing work in the City of Detroit and emerging work in Milwaukee.
Building a document framework to support ethics in cartography
Nat Case, INCase, LLC
Chelsea Nestel, University of Oregon
Aileen Buckley, ESRI
The ICA Commission on Ethics in Cartography has been running a series of workshops this summer exploring the elements and framing of ethical codes that cartographers work with, especially in map-centered organizations. The plan is to offer (1) a library of codes of ethics or conduct, statements of principles, or other documents that organize ethical guidelines, (2) a structured list of topics that are already commonly raised, or should be raised, and (3) the range of types of documents and document structures and how they address the needs of their constituents. We'll outline what we've come up with so far and leave time for group feedback.
Fractured Epistemologies/Cartographies of Disinformation
Chelsea Nestel, University of Oregon
Carolyn Fish
Kelly Bonnville-Sexton
Sarah Haedrich
Joy Ihuka
Mason Leavitt
Lauren Walker
Jasper Zhou
What’s real anyway? Does it seem like somehow it doesn’t matter anymore? Although we have always operated within and benefited from fractured epistemologies (knowledge systems), the world feels different now. A global pandemic, dis/misinformation, AI, and social media exploit that we hold different truths, approach the world from different perspectives, and make different choices. Thus, the connection of maps to reality has never been more unclear. This new world has cartographers in an identity crisis, because cartography has focused on making maps that work. This research agenda presents challenges and opportunities resulting from the current epistemic fracturing.
Map Meets Meme: Visualizing Geographic Ignorance in Trump-Era Cartographic Satire
Raechel Portelli, University of Illinois
Antonio Smith, Antonio Antoine Cartography
What happens when "Map meets Meme" in today's U.S. political climate? I will present the results of a study on internet memes that pair maps with caricatures of U.S. President Donald Trump , examining how these juxtapositions render geographic ignorance visible. I argue that these memes highlight Trump's own geopolitical ignorance, but also of geographic ignorance of Americans more broadly. Combining concepts of viral maps (Robinson 2019) and strategic ignorance as a tool of the powerful (McGoey 2012). I conclude that these memes blur the distinction between personal and structural ignorance.
Maps as a Site of Reproductive Justice
Abby Whelan, Syracuse University
Maps and map-based dashboards have proliferated since the United States Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which removed federal protections for the right to abortion. In this presentation, I examine these maps as sites of reproductive injustice by illustrating the multi-scalar and intersecting impacts of uneven reproductive healthcare access on the experiences of birthing people and their right to have or not have a child. More specifically, I use a content analysis to analyze a corpus of state and national maps and map-based dashboards. I unpack their data and design decisions that reinforce the political, racial, and economic forces which constrain the choices available to birthing people. I conclude by arguing for maps as sites for reproductive justice and offer best practices for future maps of reproductive experiences.
I am not sure we are ever quite sufficiently surprised at our capacity to read maps.
Mark Denil, sui generis
I am not sure we are ever quite sufficiently surprised at our capacity to read maps. This capacity is astonishing, because a map is so completely and utterly artificial, so contrived, so distinct and detached from any direct relationship with that which it supposedly depicts, as to be, save for learned, cultural conventions, without connection to the world, and certainly without intrinsic meaning. Our understanding of these learned, cultural conventions rest upon maps we have seen, and is actuated by means of aesthetic value judgments we make on the artifact in hand—before we can even begin to read the map.
