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MAPS & LEGENDS: EXPLORING THE CARTOGRAPHIC STATE OF PALESTINE

The fragmentation of Palestinian space and population results in a deeply wounded and torn collective archive. This workshop is a call for the re-unification and re-figuration of the Palestinian archive, specifically its cartographic content: the construction of a web-based participatory data-base of spatial information on Palestinian space.

 

A public visualization of a Palestinian spatial narrative on the history, current struggles, as well as utopian aspirations of the Palestinian people is crucial for empowering Palestinian social imaginaries. A democratic access to spatial data on Palestine is amongst the key requirements for an influential popular imagination of alternative spatial and political organization. An online public cartographic archive can provide the tools for developing such visions, and more importantly, enables their authors to communicate them globally.

To begin this long-term endeavor, we will open the discussion by analyzing the potential role of (digital) cartography in the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.

Saskia Sassen

Nora Akawi

Maps and Legends

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Directs The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com). Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007), and the 4th fully updated edition of Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2011). The Global City came out in a new fully updated edition in 2001. Her books are translated into twenty-one languages. She is currently working on When Territory Exits Existing Frameworks (Under contract with Harvard University Press). She contributes regularly to www.OpenDemocracy.net and www.HuffingtonPost.com.

Maps and Legends

Nora Akawi (born Haifa, 1985) is an architect based in New York, currently completing her MSc. in Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture, at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Her current research is on the political role of the (digital) collective archive in the visualization of the Palestinian spatial narrative and in imagining alternative spatial and political organization. Nora is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (B.Arch, 2009).

Brian Boyd

Maps and Legends

Brian Boyd is Project Director of the Columbia Center for Archaeology and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1996. He has been working on, and directing, a number of archaeological projects in Palestine, Lebanon and Israel since 1988, and is currently co-directing a Columbia-Birzeit-Sorbonne interdisciplinary project (anthropology, archaeology, environment, oral histories, community anthropology) in the West Bank. He has published extensively on the prehistoric archaeology of the region, as well as on aspects of archaeological theory.

Elizabeth Angell

Maps and Legends

Elizabeth Angell is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University.

15 April 2011, 1:00 PM
Room 208, Knox Hall
606 West 122nd Street
Columbia University

 
Earlier Event: April 11
Locating Tolerance: The Conflict over the Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem
Later Event: April 21
A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle