Plan for Wed, 6/25 and Notes from Sunday, 6/22

Plan for Wed, 6/25 (4-6pm in Blegen 205):

1. In Sunday’s meeting, we decided to start working on three or four initial mapping projects (see below notes for discussions out of which these projects/groups were formed). For anyone who was not there Sunday, you can email someone in the group for the project you are most interested in working on (ask Eli for their email address) – or you can join up with a group at Wednesday’s meeting. The three (or four) initial projects. 
   1. geospatial map(s): a. steam tunnels under the campus – (Emily, Anders); b. neighborhoods in the city (with housing inequalities, potholes?) – (Michael, Mark, Siobhan) – (these two can possibly be combined on one map)
   2. a thematic map (wage inequalities on campus, labor struggles) – (Tom, Amit, Arnoldas, Eli)
   3. a conceptual map (“driven to discover,” funding flows, corporatization of the university, land grant institution, etc.) – (Eli, Isaac)
2. If you’re interested in seeing the U’s collection of campus and city maps, meet up with Lesley and others at the Borchardt Map Library a couple hours before class on Wed. (around 2pm?) – in the basement of Wilson library. 
3. Suggested readings (we probably will spend all of the time talking about the projects, but if anybody wants to discuss the readings, we can make time for that too): “What do maps represent? The crisis of representation and the critique of cartographic reason” and “Situated pragmatics: Maps and mapping as social practice” (Chs. 2 & 3 in Pickles’ _A History of Spaces_ (2004)) (start at page 32, because the first five pages are too academic) and  “Counter-Mappings” (Ch. 9 in John Pickles’ _A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World_ (2004))

Notes from Sunday, 6/22:

• Recap of last meeting
• Talk about the ideas for maps that we brought
• Decide on a few initial map projects and form working groups around them

Recap of last meeting:

• Our audience for the map: incoming undergrad and grad students, while also reaching out to the surrounding communities
• Our intent: to combine resources for navigating the campus/city with critical commentary – mapping both spaces of power and resistance
• Bradley gave a presentation on mapping and Lesley gave a presentation on the maps and GIS on her website, True North – Mapping Minnesota’s History (lots of helpful resources here!)

Discussion of the project timeframe and technology:

• We have lots of great ideas that won’ necessarily fit into however many weeks we have left for the class this summer -> So, we could write a grant for a bigger project, and we could see this summer as a time to compile ideas, resources, and to complete a smaller project.
• Although we only have three official class meetings scheduled, we can continue meeting if we want to (the only reason we initially limited the class to three weeks is that Eli is leaving town after that time – yet, Arnoldas will still be here, and he would like to continue facilitating the class)
• People who are interested in learning about and playing with GIS could get together separately (at least Lesley, Amit, Eli, and ??? have expressed interest in doing this – Lesley has the GIS software (ArcGIS) on her computer and we can get access to it through contacts in the U’s geography department.)

Presentations of our map ideas:

• (Eli – a suggested general approach to these maps): I would like to destabilize the university’s identity as a unified entity, because this appearance of unity serves to mask conflicts, such as the wage inequalities that motivate labor struggles like the AFSCME strike last fall, and the increases in students’ tuition at the same time as students’ lose their freedom.  The administration creates this unified identity through its branding campaigns, including the older campaigns of the maroon and gold color scheme and the Gopher mascot, as well as the newer brand of “driven to discover.”  The U’s official maps, seen around campus, are framed by these brands, and thereby, users of these maps connect the territory of the campus to this branded, unified identity.  We should make maps that counter this connection by highlighting the historical conflicts in the U.  Against the U’s “driven to discover” ad campaign that presents the “discoveries” of individual professors without acknowledging the historical processes of collective labor that produce the conditions for those discoveries, we should map the ways that the campus, people, and knowledges are historically produced and all of the conflicts that happen within these production processes (e.g., wage inequalities, governing power, strikes, tuition hikes, struggles against corporate research, etc.).  Likewise, another way to counter the appearance of a unified identity is to map the connections across the constructed boundaries of the campus’s branded territorial identity, and the conflicts over inequalities in relations across these boundaries (e.g., access to education, housing and living conditions for people who work on campus, helpfulness of research done on campus for local communities, etc.). 
• (Tom): 1) re-mapping of “the Gopher Way” (in gold and maroon colors)… map wage inequalities across campus – (sorry, I missed notes here… Tom, can you fill this in?); 2) inspired by a group in American Studies called Mas Color – we could map the skin colors of people who are studied in different areas of the campus (e.g., global studies, african-american studies) – or the skin color composition of the student body or staff – this would be a way to oppose the hegemony of the maroon and gold color scheme, which masks racial inequalities created through institutional racism.
• (Emily): 1) the passages around the U that are forbidden, unknown, unmapped – people have explored these areas (e.g., the “action squad) – exploring these passages is an anti-capitalist activity (students who get bored of the social life sold to them by the “driven to discover” brand are driven to discover on their own).  – maybe multiple maps (a 3-D thing where you can see all the layers of tunnels) – could be done with a hand drawing – (it seems like a ghost of the university – spaces that have to be hidden in order to present this image of “driven to discover”) – delves into the history of the U – hidden partly because it has a working class history associated with it (the history of building the U) – 2) different things that have been done to green spaces around the U – vs. “driven to discover” b/c these areas are heavily regulated – surveillance is very difficult. 
• (Mark): 1) relationship of the U with the war effort – grants given to professors – relationships with companies – 2) ways in which the cartographic gaze has created subjects and coded identities – how the U has been involved in manufacturing identities for students (e.g., production of competitive subjects through grading) – what it means to have degrees 
• (Amit): 1) corporate funding, state funding; – how does the U redistribute funding amongst departments? – what kind of priorities should the U have in distributing funds? we can see funding as a window onto the U admin’s priorities – 2) where do students live? what are their living conditions? – where do janitors live? – show class structures involved – what kind of people constitute this university? – (Arnoldas): where does the student body live (S, N, E, W suburbs vs. N. Minneapolis – the latter is probably much less represented) – the U presents itself as a security provider
• (Michael): 1) the location of thesis paper titles on the world map – 2) where faculty and staff live – 3) student housing – show changes over the decades; 4) # of potholes in a neighborhood in conjunction with income and demographics – # of abandoned homes – ratio between empty houses and homelessness – 5) at Macalester infoshop, they have a map of war profiteers in the cities – 6) with “driven to discover,” cf. Chevron ads that say “we’re explorers” – we could list (and map) all the other corporations that have “discovery” as part of their brand
• (Isaac): “land grant institution” – they’re was a huge movement around public higher education in the 19th c. – then the US passed the 1862 Morrill land grant act, which gave the states federal land to build state institutions (to train industrial workers, military training, agriculture, etc.) – at the time, this was seen as a progressive move b/c education had been only for the elite -> We could make a map of MN with the parcels of land that the federal government gave to the state – how much they sold it for, to whom they sold it, and what’s there now – show the buildings now (e.g., WBob, Fairview – when and how much the U got for the land, etc.) – also, show Duluth, Morris, Rochester, extension programs – UMorePark (the largest contiguous piece of land owned by a land grant institution) – now the U admin is tring to create a “sustainable community” with “green technologies” on this land – But it’s clear that they’re actually trying to parcel out the land and sell it – there was probably similar historical contestation over the land grant parcels – Also, what is the relationship of the Native American reservations to the land grant act? – (Lesley): the MN historical society has maps that could be helpful for this – (Mark): it might be interesting to map the history of our changing assumptions about education in general – (Isaac): with the extension programs, ways of disseminating information are being closed off 
• (Lesley): what we want to effect through this map is to help change people’s ways of seeing the world – our data is going to be very important  – we want the maps to be not only conceptually meaningful but also have valid data – proposal for three types of maps: 1) an abstract, conceptual map (blowing out the concept of a map) – 2) a geospatial map – something that people recognize down to the base layers, but shifting it in some basic way – 3) a thematic map (e.g., race, wages, census) — But for all three of these maps, really back them up with research data – these maps would be intended to inspire our audience (students) to do research on their own 
• (Tom): 1) a scale of skin color tones – % of land of this land grant institution that previously was occupied by indigenous peoples — 2) sometimes military data is hard to find, but it’s also possible to map where we had trouble finding data – it could even be a call for people to do research to fill gaps in the info
• (Arnoldas): 1) map public and private land – changing landscape of public/private – 2) look over the years at the building of new buildings and increasing corporate sponsorship – 3) historical relationship between small businesses and chain contractors – (e.g., now all of the food service is by one corporation on campus) – 4) subvert the official map of the U that shows buildings and nothing around – instead show nothing or just geology of the campus – 5) bicycle parking vs. car parking – 6) history of the West Bank – show the land, the neighborhoods, how the U expanded over the years
• (Anders): looking at how the university has changed historically – its relation to the communities around it – the physical boundaries of the U – how they have expanded – you could include historical conflicts – how the U has expanded into different parts of the city and how different corporations have become part of the U

Discussion about choosing initial map projects:

• “driven to discover” brand is a major theme -> “driven to uncover” – maps and discovery – maps used for going out into the territory
• funding -> the model of funding has shifted at the U – now it’s more of a subcontracting model – allows the administration to capture a lot of the money – enables the administration to fund their strategic positioning initiative – we could map these lines of funding – and identify the big external grants
• how many maps? 
  • Lesley’s suggestion of three maps (conceptual, geospatial, and thematic) received general approval
  • everybody’s ideas sound great, and eventually we would like to do lots of maps, but for now we should start with a more tangible exercise – something that we could work together on to learn the basics of how to make a map – we’ll make templates that can be used for multiple maps
  • three (or four maps, with two of them possibly combined):
• 1. geospatial map(s): a. steam tunnels under the campus – (Emily, Anders); b. neighborhoodsin the city (with housing inequalities, potholes?) – (Michael, Mark, Siobhan) 
  2. a thematic map (wage inequalities on campus, labor struggles) – (Tom, Amit, Arnoldas, Eli)
  3. a conceptual map (“driven to discover,” funding flows, corporatization of the university, land grant institution, etc.) – (Eli, Isaac)