Mapping for Change Resituating 'Slow Time'. Craftwo_manship and Power (Deadline 31.05.2021)

Session “Mapping for Change? Resituating 'Slow Time'. Craftwo/manship and Power

Session Organizers: Natasha Aruri, Katleen De Flander, Andreas Brück and Tim Nebert (Germany)

This session focusses on practices of mapping in relation to the contemporary urban polycrises, and therein an investigation of necessary steps to decolonize maps and modes of their production. From this perspective, the session seeks to labor and articulate particular methods, frameworks and ideas that would serve countering the image of mapping as merely scientific and neutral. It explores how to bring to the forefront its apolitical nature as an instrument that perpetuates power relations and influences understandings of the world through underlying (re)engineering agendas (intellectually or otherwise) for the (re)production of spaces and social relations. While acknowledging that we are living in proliferating uncertainty and have conditioned and limited foresight, the driving question is: How can urbanists who seek to impact the current and forthcoming future urban transformations re-think and re-situate mapping – as method, tool and process – such that it serves shifting powers towards practices and policies that improve the everydays of people and establishes (more) socio-environmental justice? The session focuses on the practices of mapping in relation to the contemporary urban polycrises, which the session regards as perpetuated by violence and hegemony, and therewith, it is an investigation of necessary steps to decolonize mapping, maps and modes of their production. In this context, the session argues the need to ground intersectionality as a concept with spatial materializations, and how principles of feminist data visualizations can orient mapping processes to establish new frames of seeing our everydays; by revealing the spatial articulations, dimensions and relations of power differentials, structural violence, dispossession and hegemony. Therein, the session explores how data and data visualizations can challenge and shift these paradigms, and argue that changing the rules-of-the-game of mapping requires resituating ‘slow time’ and experiential elements at the center of mapping processes. This is essential for nurturing tacit knowledge and therewith a new kind of mapping craftswo/manship that is able to capture and articulate the complexity and messiness of our urban present being, and probably our futures. One of the goals this project had set for itself was to identify methodologies and tactical-mapping strategies that could be conductive to endeavors aimed towards a more just and environmentally conscious urban, whether those of institutions or civil struggles. Through transdisciplinary dialogue our project explored modalities for navigating contemporary complexities and ideas for methodologies that could give rise to cumulating and layering different mapping strategies, typologies, and tactics (STT’s) for tackling urban polycrises.

Submission of Papers

All sessions have to comply with the conference organization rules (see below). If you want to present a paper, please submit your abstract via the official conference website: https://gcsmus.org until 31.05.2021. You will be informed by 31.07.2021, if your proposed paper has been accepted for presentation at the conference. For further information, please see the conference website or contact the session organizers, Natasha Aruri, Katleen De Flander, Andreas Brück and Tim Nebert (andreas.brueck@tu-berlin.de; deflander@tu-berlin.de; tim.nebert@tu-berlin.de; n.aruri@tu-berlin.de).

About the Conference

The “Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability” (GCSMUS) together with the Research Committee on “Logic and Methodology in Sociology” (RC33) of the “International Sociology Association” (ISA) and the Research Network “Quantitative Methods” (RN21) of the European Sociology Association” (ESA) will organize a “1st International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Spatial Methods” (“SMUS Conference”) which will at the same time be the “1st RC33 Regional Conference – Africa: Botswana” from Thursday 23.09 – Sunday 26.09.2021, hosted by the University of Botswana in Gaborone, Botswana. Given the current challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference will convene entirely online. The conference aims at promoting a global dialogue on methods and should attract methodologists from all over the world and all social and spatial sciences (e.g. area studies, architecture, communication studies, educational sciences, geography, historical sciences, humanities, landscape planning, philosophy, psychology, sociology, urban design, urban planning, traffic planning and environmental planning). Thus, the conference will enable scholars to get in contact with methodologists from various disciplines all over the world and to deepen discussions with researchers from various methodological angles. Scholars of all social and spatial sciences and other scholars who are interested in methodological discussions are invited to submit a paper to any sessions of the conference. All papers have to address a methodological problem.

Please find more information on the above institutions on the following websites:

Rules for Session Organization (According to GCSMUS Objectives and RC 33 Statutes)

  1. There will be no conference fees.
  2. The conference language is English. All papers therefore need to be presented in English.
  3. All sessions have to be international: Each session should have speakers from at least two countries (exceptions will need good reasons).
  4. Each paper must contain a methodological problem (any area, qualitative or quantitative).
  5. There will be several calls for abstracts via the GCSMUS, RC33 and RN21 Newsletters. To begin with, session organizers can prepare a call for abstracts on their own initiative, then at a different time, there will be a common call for abstracts, and session organizers can ask anybody to submit a paper.
  6. GCSMUS, RC33 and RN21 members may distribute these calls via other channels. GCSMUS members and session organizers are expected to actively advertise their session in their respective scientific communities.
  7. Speakers can only have one talk per session. This also applies for joint papers. It will not be possible for A and B to present at the same time one paper as B and A during the same session. This would just extend the time allocated to these speakers.
  8. Session organizers may present a paper in their own session.
  9. Sessions will have a length of 90 minutes with a maximum of 4 papers or a length of 120 minutes with a maximum of 6 papers. Session organizers can invite as many speakers as they like. The number of sessions depends on the number of papers submitted to each session. E.g. if 12 good papers are submitted to a session, there will be two sessions with a length of 90 minutes each with 6 papers in each session.
  10. Papers may only be rejected for the conference if they do not present a methodological problem (as stated above), are not in English or are somehow considered by session organizers as not being appropriate or relevant for the conference. Session organizers may ask authors to revise and resubmit their paper so that it fits these requirements. If session organizers do not wish to consider a paper submitted to their session, they should inform the author and forward the paper to the local organizing team who will find a session where the paper fits for presentation.
  11. Papers directly addressed to the conference organising committee (and those forwarded from session organizers) will be offered to other session organizers (after proofing for quality). The session organizers will have to decide on whether or not the paper can be included in their session(s). If the session organizers think that the paper does not fit into their session(s), the papers should be sent back to the conference organizing committee as soon as possible so that the committee can offer the papers to another session organizer.