Map Up at the AAG

Taylor Shelton and I are organizing a series of panels at the AAG called, simply, “Map Up”. We are building on the work of Laura Nader, particularly her well-known essay “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up,” as well as a number of scholars who have recently taken up Nader’s framework in studies of algorithmic fairness (Barabas et al. 2020) and the tech industry (Seaver 2014). The complete call is here, but the gist is this:

…this panel session will entertain the possibility that critical mapping might make important empirical, theoretical, and political interventions by following Nader’s call and ‘mapping up’: mapping evictors, not just evictions; extractors, not just extraction; colonizers, not just colonization; white supremacists, not just white supremacy. […] This panel convenes scholars and activists who will share work, stories, and insights from practices and projects that ‘map up’

These panels are sponsored by the Digital Geographies, Cartography, and Geographic Information Science and Systems Specialty Groups of the AAG.