GSEJ founding members Trude Sundberg, Jennifer Leigh and SSPSSR colleagues Susie Bass, Rachel Seoighe, and Ames Clark are hosting another session for the ‘Queerying’ workshop series on 23 September
Through creative and practice based discussions and activities, this workshop will explore the history of maps, as a form of (colonial) epistemological violence, and how this can be challenged by subverting maps as a tool for resistance and queer world-building.
The organisers wrote:
‘We use and are implicated in maps every day: navigating unfamiliar (and familiar!) spaces; recommending our favourite places to friends; having our activities and data mapped out and sharing our location, both knowingly and not. The maps we refer to quite literally shape the way we encounter the world, and often do so in ways that privilege white, colonial and capitalist borders, names, sovereignty, and orientations.
‘In this creative and participatory workshop we will be exploring how we might queer maps & mapping, and how maps are used as tools of resistance and world-building. We will explore examples of grassroots and community led participatory and counter-mapping projects, as well as mapping tools that go beyond the spatial, such as body maps and emotional mapping. Starting from our shared space of the university, we will build on these examples with our own creative mapping activities. Through these activities we will ask how alternative maps might challenge our relationship to the land, the university, and the futures we are collectively engaged in building.’
The workshop is free and open to all. You can register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/queerying-the-map-tickets-415829335737?aff=estw&utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-source=tw&utm-term=listing
*Featured image is from Shanzhi Lui’s Data Atlas (2017), a project of data cartography in which they charted data clouds in a 5km radius and layered the information into this map.