LIVINGMAPS: Indigenous Cartographies

Maps have often been used to stake territorial claims over resources. This practice is not confined to the era of European colonialism, it continues to be an operating principle of nation states or multi-national corporations wherever they seek to extend their domains by ignoring or delegitimising the customary rights of indigenous peoples. In this seminar we will be looking at how far cartography can become a means of resistance challenging the prerogatives of power and re-asserting historical entitlements to land and landscape.

Michael Bravo
Envisioning Inuit Homelands with Trails and Tracks: a Discussion of the Pan-Inuit Atlas

Jerome Lewis
Using Maps to Create a Third Space in Which to Contest Power: Experiences From the Extreme Citizen Science Group UCL

Michael is based at the Scott Polar Research Institute where his current project is producing the Pan-Inuit Trails Atlas. He is the author of Narrating the Arctic (2002). Jerome has been working to support Pygmy hunter-gatherers defend their land and rights since 1993. He currently co-directs the Extreme Citizen Science Group at UCL to develop indigenously co-designed mapping software for smartphones to address problems identified by participants.

Tickets can be purchased on Eventbrite. £10 for professionals/academics, £5 for concessionaries.

Image courtesy of Michael Bravo