2021, “Spatial Justice as Research Practice” Forum, GU/CULP Global Humanities Public Infrastructures Seminar Series, Mortara Center for International Studies and the Program in Culture and Politics, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, September 21
Featuring:
DETOURS: A DECOLONIAL GUIDE TO HAWAI’I
Hokulani K Aikau, University of Utah
Vernadette V Gonzalez, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Alex Gil, Columbia University
A PEOPLE’S GUIDE TO NUCLEAR COLORADO
Shiloh Krupar, Georgetown University
Sarah Kanouse, Northeastern University
RESPONDENT
Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist University
INTRODUCTION
Arjun Shankar, Georgetown University
Emerging from a confluence of technological tools, theoretical infrastructures, and political concerns of the mid 2000s, the “spatial justice” framing of the humanities has multiplied the forms used by researchers to share—and sometimes make—work with the public. Attuned to both operations and contestations of power, these various “people’s” atlases, guidebooks, storymaps, walking tours, and geolocated media projects originate in different disciplines and cut across digital and analog platforms. However, they share a commitment to reaching both academic and popular audiences to make spatial injustice perceivable, challengeable, and therefore changeable. While such projects might aspire to expose and contest colonial, racial, and environmental injustice, they may rely on data dependent on the perpetration of harm and render it perceptible primarily to audiences physically distanced from its most brutal effects. Dominant cultural metaphors for navigating physical and virtual spaces risk reinscribing colonialist paradigms of exploration and discovery. Conventions of the digital interface—like the map’s God’s eye view or GIS applications that center the user’s body—are hardly conceptually neutral, yet defying them can diminish the accessibility of content. Moreover, such projects usually involve collaboration not just between similarly positioned scholars but also with librarians, designers, technologists, students, and non-academic communities that unfold within institutional management cultures that often organize collaborations along hierarchical and neoliberal lines even while seeking to capitalize on the reputational benefits of accessible and inclusive public scholarship.
This panel brings together researchers engaged with a diverse array of recent spatial humanities projects to consider the conceptual, practical, and political dimensions of their work. What practices of data collection and interpretation might guide the creation of spatial platforms about spatial (in)justice? What publics are envisioned and assembled by these projects? What roles can design play—infrastructurally, graphically, and experientially—to trouble distanced consumption and foster recognition? And finally, what practices of collaboration, coordination, and (anti-) institutionalization have been developed that further, enact, and clarify the work’s underlying liberatory goals?
Forum curated by Shiloh Krupar (Georgetown University) and Sarah Kanouse (Northeastern University)