How do we as critical cartographers share our knowledge and tools? How can we encourage students to become counter-mappers for their part and enrich counter-cartography their perspectives, skills and experiences? The series “Teaching counter-cartographies” explores these questions by presenting different teaching-learning experiences. It hopes to inspire, both, cartography lecturers, by offering heterodox approaches to teaching cartography, and experienced counter-cartographers, by sharing students invigorating, unorthodox cartographic works. The series’ second contribution comes from Hamburg: As part of the methods seminar “Critical Cartographies”, taught by Katrin Singer and Paul Schweizer, six maps were created in student projects on different thematic complexes around corona, border regimes, tight to the city, street names and colonial continuities, as well as emotionality, body and affect.
“The academy is not paradise” (hooks 1994: 207).
The academic classroom is a space that is constantly being reconfigured and reproduced by social power relations and sets of norms. Here, according to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s understanding, various intersectional power constellations come into play, structuring access to specific forms of knowledge, learning and mediation. At the same time, (higher) education in the sense of an “engaged pedagogy” (hooks 1994: 13ff) can offer a space to scrutinize and transform precisely these social relations.
In the seminar “Critical Cartographies”, which took place in the winter semester 2020/21 at the Institute of Geography at the University of Hamburg, 19 students and two lecturers explored practices of critical mapping. Lengthy classes in blocks, exclusively digital learning and communication, and the individual and social realities of pandemic everyday life challenged us demanding extraordinary efforts, time and energy. Therefore, we chose the reality of our lives in 2020 as the starting point for our cartographic inquiry. This reflexive approach enabled us to methodically explore possibilities of transformation in our immediate social world through forms of dialogical learning (Freire 2000: 168).
„But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress“ (hooks 1994: 207).
Collectively, we questioned our previous understandings of maps, their postulates of truth, boundaries, projections and categories. With reference to the most diverse mapping practices – academic, artistic and activist – we opened our view beyond the limited thematic and representational repertoire of traditional Western cartography. We also looked at the views and positions on the world that the people mapping constantly carry with them on their backs, like a turtle (Anzaldúa 1999). We began to use relief maps and body mapping exercises to map and critically question our individual positions, emotions and embodiments (Rodó-de-Zárate 2014). Like the engaged pedagogy postulated by bell hooks, engaged cartography seeks to address different sensory perceptions and reveal positionings in order to mediate different forms of knowledge.
Inspired by theoretical debates in critical, feminist and decolonial cartography and partly trained by earlier courses on creative research methods, the students drew from a colourful methodological toolbox – recording devices, watercolours, SagaGis, music, meditation, drawing programmes and many more – and set out in small groups to critically map the year 2020.
“2020 – an atlas” presents the visual results of this learning research in six maps. The accompanying texts provide insights into the mapping processes from which they emerged. This diverse compilation of maps looks critically at emotions, bodies, street names, borders, contested urban places and everyday life in times of the pandemic.
The resulting maps are not only interpretations of space by the respective cartographers, but also critical analyses of social conditions in a challenging year. “2020 – an Atlas” should be read with a complex understanding of space and time that goes far beyond this year.
As teachers, we are impressed, grateful and hopeful about these mappings and the radical openness with which the students contested the shared learning processes. We hope that you, as viewers of this atlas, feel a little of bell hook’s understanding of education:
„… I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions – a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom“ (hooks 1994: 12).
Anzaldúa, Gloria (1999): Boderlands / La Frontera. San Fransisco: Aunt Lute.
Freire, Paulo (2000): Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
hooks, bell (1994): Teaching to transgress. Education as the practice of freedom. New York/London: Routledge.
Rodó-de-Zárate, Maria (2014): Developing geographies of intersectionality with Relief Maps: reflections from youth research in Manresa, Catalonia. In: Gender, Place & Culture 21 (8), p. 925–944.
