Maps don’t always answer straight-forward questions. They can also be powerful tools to build community and help navigate through situations where it’s not clear what questions to ask. Community mapping is a longer-term dialogue between maps & data and the lived experiences and political realities of people. It’s an iterative, back-and-forth process which can be rewarding and fruitful community organizations and for me as a cartographer. For more on community mapping and counter-cartography, see my thesis: Alternative Cartographies Building Collective Power.
In the past, I have:
- Developed maps & visualizations of the legacy of agricultural infrastructure in Warren County, NC, based on interviews I helped conduct as part of a process of community economic development led by Working Landscapes
- Worked with residents in the oldest historically African-American neighborhood in Chapel Hill to understand and document the impact that student-housing development was having on the quality of life in their neighborhood; the maps we produced helped lead the Town Council to pass a one-year moratorium on development.
- Designed mapping and data components for None of the Above, a traveling exhibit about the school-to-prison pipeline, based on interviews with teachers, students, people in prison and folks working in the legal system (see more of my work on Behance and also here)
- Worked with students at Queen Mary University to produce a counter/map of their campus and it’s role in the policing of immigration in the United Kingdom, as part of a monthlong residency at that campus.
