Mapping Injustice: The World is Witness, Place-Framing, and the Politics of Viewing on Google Earth

Abstract

Working from assumptions that inequality is often spatially informed, a set of interactive cartographies has recently proliferated on Google Earth. In this essay, I analyze one of these interactive cartographies: the World is Witness, produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). I read the map as an organizational rhetoric that frames place as “embedded injustice.” I also argue that thorough analysis of the framing of local place on Google Earth must inherently question whether the map can create a disruption in the viewing subject. While the map presents vital information on excruciatingly despicable acts of injustice, and the USHMM should be praised for its actions, it reinforces and is reinforced by the politics of viewing on Google Earth. We live in a map-immersed world. A plethora of maps surround us at any given moment. Road maps help us find a new school or restaurant, a concert venue, or an auto shop. Weather maps inform us about climate and storm patterns across geographies, and city maps give insight into crime patterns. Around election time, political maps construct “blue states” and “red states.” Tourist maps rhetorically construct certain spaces as exotic and unique and help us situate our bodies within these visitor-friendly spaces, meanwhile facilitating a colonialist construction of the identities of those hosts who live in the spaces (Del Casino & Hanna, 2000). With each of these cases, it is clear that the maps encountered in our everyday lives are used to both navigate and politically construct the spaces and places within which human beings reside. Recently, certain maps have been used to organize geographies around themes of injustice, oppression, or political resistance. These maps, often called