On The Living Black Atlas: Learning Geospatial Ethics from the African American Freedom Struggle

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Living Black Atlas seeks to create space within geospatial classrooms and workplaces for curating, amplifying, and learning from the seldom-discussed cartographic practices undergirding the African American Freedom Struggle. Beyond a static collection of maps, the Atlas comprises dynamic understandings of the Black experience that challenge staid notions of what a map is and how and where mapping takes place. African American communities have long engaged in countermapping, restorative cartographies, radical geospatial intelligence, visual story-telling, and embodied productions of geographic knowledge that affirm the value of Black life and imagine more just futures. The Living Black Atlas can help create the inclusive education necessary for broadening participation in the geospatial field, acknowledging the social power relations and different spatial epistemologies circulating through maps, and inspiring us to conceive of mapping and its ethical possibilities in more creative and community-centred ways outside of industry standards, professionalized practices, and scientific conventions.