It’s all too easy to overlook the rush of activity that enables privileged retreat; the Othered precarity that ensures our security; the tangle of urban, regional, national, and global socio-technical networks that support our local stasis — unless we are ourselves a node within those essential systems, or unless we experience the repercussions of... See more

But while an unmarked terrain might cultivate disorientation and unease, “emptiness” can also be marshaled as a political tool, as with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. If it’s empty, why not take it?

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

maps can serve as “tools for social transformation”; that they can “produce worlds instead of simply reflecting them.”

As some North American urbanites engaged in what Indigenous scholar Kelsey Leonard has called “entitled escapism” — fleeing cramped apartments for more spacious country homes, trading compaction and contagion for “bountiful space” and “fertile suspension” — some sovereign Indigenous nations refused to allow these settler-migrant populations to pass... See more

Such contemplative practice has undoubtedly been therapeutic, even psychologically essential, for many of us as we’ve grappled with tumult and trauma: nothing as escape from the too-muchness of it all.

Nothingness, then, for all its presumed vacuity, is a multi-faceted thing: it embodies ways of knowing, it has ontological agency and politics, it has degrees and dimensions. A map of nothing demonstrates that an experiential nothingness depends upon a robust ecology of somethingness to enable its occurrence; and it recognizes the particular... 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

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