Cartographers have been grappling with their own epistemological barrens. Medieval and Renaissance mapmakers famously demarcated the edges of the discovered world with mythical sea creatures that embodied the limits of exploration and knowledge. As historian Chet Van Duzer argues, those monsters represented a variety of epistemological... See more

The pandemic has demonstrated how legacies of racism and colonialism and patterns of inequity continue to pervade our urban ecologies, and how those ecologies extend well beyond the city limits.

Medieval and Renaissance mapmakers famously demarcated the edges of the discovered world with mythical sea creatures that embodied the limits of exploration and knowledge. As historian Chet Van Duzer argues, those monsters represented a variety of epistemological orientations. They served as “interfaces between the known and unknown,” possible... See more

Consider some of those dispatches from the Great Pause: What if we took each sourdough selfie, each Zoom class, each Peloton ride, each Netflix binge and mapped the ecology of resources and services that have made it possible for some of us? And at the same time impossible for others? Our Everlane austerity, lo-fi authenticity, and seamless... See more

an ostensible pause that instead merely extends, and in many ways exacerbates, the injustices of our society and the inadequacies of our ways of conceptualizing and modeling city life.

embodied mapping can offer insight into “desire lines,” all those paths people carve through the city that might not align with official transit routes and pedestrian conduits.

Scientists couldn’t look directly at nothing to see something; they had to look and listen around the void, deploying techniques similar to image compositing and echolocation. We might apply these lessons, these techniques, to our own attempts to comprehend the pandemic’s pause, which has its own experiential event horizon. We have to look and... See more

Yet as in the archives, “new evidentiary technologies” and techniques — including remote sensing and forensic fossil seed analysis — are revealing the forest’s topographically hidden, and politically erased, scripts and structures; they’re demonstrating how, in the words of ecologist William Balée, the forest constitutes a “vast archaeological... See more

Sociologist Whitney Pirtle describes the nexus of factors that have contributed to the “overrepresentation of Black death” in Detroit: Racism and capitalism mutually construct harmful social conditions that fundamentally shape COVID-19 disease inequities because they (a) shape multiple diseases that interact with COVID-19 to influence poor health... See more