The Futures Initiative and the Graduate Center Library regret that this event has been canceled. We hope to reschedule very soon and will post details here when they are confirmed.

Queering the Map: Theoretical Reflections on Spatial Methods for Action Research

In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau writes that “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.” But what if the everyday stories you seek are already cut up by centuries of structural inequality and oppression, such as those of lesbians and queer women? In this talk on “Queering the Map,” Jack Gieseking investigates what can be gained for the study of queer lives and spaces by bringing together the isolated but overlapping stories of lesbians and queer women in maps, from the hand-drawn to the most technologically advanced and interactive.

Drawing upon qualitative and quantitative work on lesbians’ and queer women’s spaces and economies in New York City from 1983 to 2008—including multi-generational focus groups and mental maps, archival research and GIS—Gieseking works through three different types of mapping methods and platforms within a participatory action research framework. Through a close analysis of mental maps, QGIS, and TileMill/Mapbox, they suggest that the spatial and verbal can both obfuscate or illuminate understandings of everyday life. It is the queer practice of holding these seeming binaries in tension that reveals the most rich and complicated knowledge.

Jen Jack Gieseking is a sociocultural geographer, feminist and queer theorist, and urban environmental psychologist. S/he is engaged in research on co-productions of space and identity in digital and material environments, with a focus on sexual and gender identities. Jack’s work pays special attention to how such productions support or inhibit social, spatial, and economic justice. S/he is working on his first monograph, Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queer Women, 1983-2008. S/he is New Media & Data Visualization Postdoctoral Fellow at Bowdoin College where he is helping to found the entirely new interdisciplinary program of Digital and Computational Studies.

Jack’s first book is The People, Place, and Space Reader, co-edited with William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert, and recently out with Routledge. S/he has held fellowships with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as German Chancellor Fellow; The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies; and the Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellows Program. Jack has published in Journal of Urban Affairs, Qualitative Inquiry, Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, Antipode, and Radical History Review, and has contributed to HASTAC as well. S/he also writes about her research as a blogger with the Huffington Post Gay Voices.

The event is cosponsored by The Futures Initiative, Mina Rees Library, CUNY Graduate Center, CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, Graduate Center Digital Initiatives, New York City Digital Humanities (NYCDH), CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies, and the Environmental Psychology Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY.