Unbounded: Rethinking Borders with New Visualization Technologies

Western state cartography has produced the common understanding of “the border” as the line between two sovereign areas, but this simplistic view is now being challenged by practices of critical cartography and geography. Academics, activists, artists, and government institutions are developing new understandings of the border as multifaceted phenomena of performance, experience, movement, and conflict. These modern understandings require more complex methods of representation. This thesis investigates how new cartographic and visualization technologies can contribute to a new, more complex understanding of “the border.”Bachelor of Art

Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication, and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping

This book brings together critical perspectives on the role that mapping people, knowledges and data now plays in humanitarian work, both in cartographic terms and through data visualisations. Since the rise of Google Earth in 2005, there has been an explosion in the use of mapping tools to quantify and assess the needs of the poor, including those affected by climate change and the wider neo-liberal agenda. Yet, while there has been a huge upsurge in the data produced around these issues, the representation of people remains questionable. Some have argued that representation has diminished in humanitarian crises as people are increasingly reduced to data points. In turn, this data becomes ever more difficult to analyse without vast computing power, leading to a dependency on the old colonial powers to refine the data of the poor, before selling it back to them. These issues are not entirely new, and questions around representation, participation and humanitarianism can be traced back beyond the speeches of Truman, but the digital age throws these issues back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the subjugated and subaltern. This book questions whether, as we map crises, it is the map itself that is in crisis

Mapping Crisis

The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the subjugated and subaltern. Since the rise of Google Earth in 2005, there has been an explosion in the use of mapping tools to quantify and assess the needs of those in crisis, including those affected by climate change and the wider neo-liberal agenda. Yet, while there has been a huge upsurge in the data produced around these issues, the representation of people remains questionable. Some have argued that representation has diminished in humanitarian crises as people are increasingly reduced to data points. In turn, this data has become ever more difficult to analyse without vast computing power, leading to a dependency on the old colonial powers to refine the data collected from people in crisis, before selling it back to them. This book brings together critical perspectives on the role that mapping people, knowledges and data now plays in humanitarian work, both in cartographic terms and through data visualisations, and questions whether, as we map crises, it is the map itself that is in crisis

Colonial Cartographies, Postcolonial Borders, and Enduring Failures of International Law: The Unending Wars Along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier

Many of today\u27s pervasive and intractable security and nation-building dilemmas issue from the dissonance between the prescribed model of territorially bounded nation-states and the imprisonment of postcolonial polities in territorial straitjackets bequeathed by colonial cartographies. With a focus on the Durand Line, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the epicenter of the prolonged war in the region, this article explores the enduring ramifications of the mutually constitutive role of colonialism and modern law. The global reach of colonial rule reordered subjects and reconfigured space. Fixed territorial demarcations of colonial possessions played a pivotal role in this process. Nineteenth century constructs of international law, geography, geopolitics, and the frontier, fashioned in the age of empire, were interwoven in the enabling frame that made the drawing of colonial borders like the Durand Line possible. Imperatives of colonial rule and compulsions of imperial rivalries positioned these demarcations that often cut across age-old cultural and historical social units. Postcolonial states inherited these demarcations and, with them, a host of endemic political and security afflictions. Modern international law, which in its incipient state lent license to colonial rule, today legitimates colonial cartographies, thereby accentuating postcolonial dilemmas of nation-building and territorial integrity. By freeze-framing inherited colonial borders, international law forces disparate people to circumscribe their political aspirations within predetermined territorial bounds, precluding political and territorial arrangements in tune with their aspirations. To silence the questions that rise from colonial territorial demarcations, international law raises the specter of disorder. It seeks to preserve order, even an unjust and dysfunctional one. In the process, international law betrays a deeper affliction that plagues it - its refusal to squarely face its complicity in colonial domination accentuates its inability to resolve today\u27s international disputes procreated by colonial cartographies

Methodologies for Housing Justice Resource Guide

This Resource Guide is the outcome of a Summer Institute on Methodologies for Housing Justice convened by the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin as part of the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities Network, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1758774). Held in Los Angeles in August 2019, the Summer Institute brought together participants from cities around the world. As is the case with the overall scope and purpose of the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities Network, it created a shared terrain of scholarship for movement-based and university-based scholars. Dissatisfied with the canonical methods that are in use in housing studies and guided by housing justice movements that are active research communities, the Summer Institute was premised on the assertion that methodology is political. Methodology is rooted in arguments about the world and involves relations of power and knowledge. The method itself – be it countermapping or people’s diaries – does not ensure an ethics of solidarity and a purpose of justice. Such goals require methodologies for liberation. Thus, as is evident in this Resource Guide, our endeavor foregrounds innovative methods that are being used by researchers across academia and activism and explicitly situates such methods in an orientation towards housing justice

Cartografías de la COVID-19 y divisiones funcionales del territorio: un análisis de la evolución de la pandemia basada en las Zonas Básicas de Salud (ZBS) en Castilla y León (España)

In the face of the confusion and uncertainty that COVID-19 has caused over the last year, Geography has proven to be a useful aid in the interpretation of the spatial dynamics that explain the transmission of the virus. Applied cartography and GIS analysis of epidemiological data have been consolidated as essential tools for interpreting the health crisis. This paper explores the usefulness of maps for the study of the evolution of the pandemic in Castile and Leon, one of the Spanish regions with the highest levels of infection and mortality. Based on the statistical variables of sick and dead people at the scale of the Basic Health Area (BHA), a first analytical approach is carried out by means of a sequence of dynamic maps during the first wave. Afterwards, a systematic study is carried out using thematic mapping for the period of the three waves, a period between March 2020 and March 2021. The analysis unravels the differential impact of the disease between rural and urban areas and reveals the problems of the mismatch between the functional divisions of the territory (BHA, as units of health analysis) and the scale of administrative management (municipalities, as the effective scale of action).Ante el desconcierto y el desconocimiento generado en el último año por la COVID-19, la Geografía ha demostrado su utilidad para la interpretación de las dinámicas espaciales que explican la transmisión del virus. La cartografía aplicada y el análisis de datos epidemiológicos mediante SIG se han consolidado como herramientas esenciales para interpretar la crisis sanitaria. Este trabajo explora la utilidad de los mapas para el estudio de la evolución de la pandemia en Castilla y León, una de las regiones españolas con mayores niveles de contagio y mortalidad. A partir de las variables estadísticas de enfermos y fallecidos en la escala de la Zona Básica de Salud (ZBS), se efectúa una primera aproximación analítica mediante una secuencia de mapas dinámicos durante la primera ola. Posteriormente, se realiza un estudio sistemático mediante cartografía temática para las tres olas, entre marzo de 2020 y marzo de 2021. El análisis muestra el impacto diferencial de la enfermedad entre espacios rurales y núcleos urbanos y revela los problemas del desajuste entre las divisiones funcionales del territorio (ZBS, como unidades de análisis sanitario) y la escala de la gestión administrativa (municipios, como escala efectiva de actuación)

Topologies of Regional Cinema: Philippine, Mindanaon, and Southeast Asian Films

This PhD by Publication investigates the entanglements of national and regional cinema formations. It explores the potential of peripheral regional cinema imaginaries and proposes a topological approach to film research, interpretation, and curation informed by the geographical concepts of place and scale. The national and regional contexts addressed are Philippine, Mindanao, and Southeast Asian cinemas. The portfolio comprises (1) my book, The End of National Cinema: Filipino Film at the Turn of the Century (2016), which interrogates the significance and limitations of the national cinema paradigm and the ramification of placemaking films in forming imaginaries beneath and beyond the nation-state; (2) three essays—“Tu Pug Imatuy: Small Film, Global Connections” (2019), “Allegories of Scale: On Three Films Set in Mindanao” (2021), “Topos, Historia, Islas: Film Islands and Regional Cinemas” (2021)—that conceptualise regional cinema by centring on films made or set in Mindanao; and (3) three film programmes, This Land Is Ours (2019), Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Southeast Asia (2021), and LUMAD (2021), curated with activist intentions, concretising the micro- and macro-regional contexts of Mindanao films in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. The submission is methodologically attentive to placemaking, scale mapping, and topological thinking. It demonstrates how they facilitate a process-oriented, openended, and comparative understanding of contemporary regional cinema sensitive to the volatile politics of (national) inclusion, marginalisation, and exclusion, the contradictions of one’s practice vis-à-vis one’s location, and the possibilities of solidarity and collaboration within and across borders

This Is Not an Atlas: A Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies

This Is Not an Atlas gathers more than 40 counter-cartographies from all over the world. This collection shows how maps are created and transformed as a part of political struggle, for critical research or in art and education: from indigenous territories in the Amazon to the anti-eviction movement in San Francisco; from defending commons in Mexico to mapping refugee camps with balloons in Lebanon; from slums in Nairobi to squats in Berlin; from supporting communities in the Philippines to reporting sexual harassment in Cairo. This Is Not an Atlas seeks to inspire, to document the underrepresented, and to be a useful companion when becoming a counter-cartographer yourself

Media and Mapping Practices in the Middle East and North Africa

A few months into the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in 2009/10, the promises of social media, including its ability to influence a participatory governance model, grassroots civic engagement, new social dynamics, inclusive societies and new opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs, became more evident than ever. Simultaneously, cartography received new considerable interest as it merged with social media platforms. In an attempt to rearticulate the relationship between media and mapping practices, whilst also addressing new and social media, this interdisciplinary book abides by one relatively clear point: space is a media product. The overall focus of this book is accordingly not so much on the role of new technologies and social networks as it is on how media and mapping practices expand the very notion of cultural engagement, political activism, popular protest and social participation