Dr. Sandra Jeppesen - Distinguished Researcher Talk: "Counter Mapping Borders in Crisis: Housing, Healthcare and Migration"
About the Event
Maps draw borders. To study borders means to study maps. With the advent of digital spaces and the rise of authoritarianism, borders have become intensified sites of contestation. Activists have often challenged borders, maps, and the power of big data, by appropriating data sets and other technologies. This talk investigates how they are using this reappropriated data, or creating their own community-driven datasets, to create community maps counter to dominant maps, in order to redraw borders, challenging arbitrary lines placed on dominant data maps for the purposes of colonialization and territorial control. This talk looks at three counter-mapping case studies to investigate how community and media activist groups reshape not just borders but also our understanding of what borders mean, exploring how counter-maps have been used to assert collective agency and autonomy for the most marginalized during crises. The three case studies include: the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) in the USA challenging the housing crisis; the Mapeo San Miguel project mapping La Vega Barrio in Caracas, Venezuela challenging the healthcare crisis; and the No Border Network and Calais Migrant Solidarity maps in France challenging the migrant crisis. Sharing maps created by these different global communities who are mapping their communities to contest these three crises, I present a comparative analysis of three different logics by which we can understand borders and how they are being contested through counter-mapping: (1) dominant state and capitalist ‘border logics’, (2) charity-model humanitarian borders and ‘human rights logics’, and (3) grassroots activists and critical migration studies ‘no border logics’. Findings from this cross-sector, cross-scale design reveal that specific counter-mapping practices can shift the terrain of maps from oppressive border logics and legalistic human rights logics toward the more liberatory logics of no borders.
About the Speaker
Dr. Sandra Jeppesen is Professor in Media, Film & Communications at Lakehead University, co-founder of the Media Action Research Group, and the Research Centre for Sustainable Communities, and former Lakehead University Research Chair in Transformative Media and Social Movements. Her recent books include Transformative Media: Intersectional Technopolitics from Indymedia to #BlackLivesMatter (2021); The Capitol Riots: Digital Media, Disinformation, and Democracy Under Attack (2022); Queer Cartography (forthcoming); and The Political Economy of Alternative Media (forthcoming). She has won the IAMCR Urban Communication Award for her research on smart cities; and she currently researches on community approaches to smart cities, smart technologies, data justice, digital EDI, and counter-mapping.