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?
Online: September 21st, Tuesday
5:30-6:45pm Eastern
DETOURS: A DECOLONIAL GUIDE TO HAWAI’I
Hokulani K Aikau, University of Victoria
Vernadette V Gonzalez, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
TORN APART/SEPARADOS
Alex Gil, Columbia University
A PEOPLE’S ATLAS OF NUCLEAR COLORADO
Shiloh Krupar, Georgetown University
Sarah Kanouse, Northeastern University
RESPONDENT
Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist University
INTRODUCTION
Arjun Shankar, Georgetown University
Forum curated by Shiloh Krupar (Georgetown) and Sarah Kanouse (Northeastern University)
The Culture and Politics Program “Public Infrastructures” Series - Walsh School of Foreign Service
