Join us for the Ethnographic Salon 2024 roundtable on mapping and shape-shifting, featuring Dr. Shannon Mattern (University of Pennsylvania) and Dr. Annette Kim (USC). Mapping is a technical, political, and imaginative practice. Extant critiques of the mapping imagination have noted the move from imperial forms of seeing to counter-mapping efforts to present the world anew (Crampton 2010, Mattern 2013). The latter follows an ethics and ontological politics that subverts the exclusionary, extractive, and unimaginative forms of map-making that feed into dominant economic, racial, and political regimes (Mattern 2015, Peluso 1995, Morris and Voyce 2015). Building on this line of critique and the new horizons of map-making it inspires (e.g. Bond 2017, Fujikane 2021, Loften and Vaughan-Lee 2019, Chari 2017, and many more), we are interested in dwelling more slowly in the problem of form and shape shifting. How do we map phenomena, beings, and places that are in constant transformation? What aesthetic and epistemological questions might be generated by a mapping practice that is committed to changing form? And what kind of collective analytic resources might mapping in a studio context produce?

The Ethnographic Salon is an annual event hosted by the Ethnography Studio celebrating various forms of ethnographic analysis.

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