HOW DOES COUNTERMAPPING REVEAL AND CHALLENGE POWER INEQUALITIES?

Ella Bosworth-Gerbino (OHS)

In Year 9, school children across the country in the UK learn how to read maps, and how to plot their way across fields of cows, as part of the Duke of Edinburgh scheme. In many other parts of the world, those less fortunate follow quite different maps, designed by human smugglers, to avoid interception by border guards, as they search for sanctuary. In these examples, we can see the wide variety of practices that can be considered as maps. We also glimpse the range of purposes these charts may hold. For some, they help with building a cv, and with acquiring those ever important UCAS points. For others, they are a matter of life and death. This essay will explore how maps suggest that places are distinct, and how they emphasise the importance of territory and borders; but how countermapping can erase these lines and focus the user’s gaze onto something that is perhaps more interesting. I will look at two examples of online countermapping and how they show power and the imbalances it causes. Countermapping is the use of maps to show injustice, often in opposition to borders created by colonialism, or other power inequalities. However, it can also be used simply to point out irregularities in travel patterns or population density. Maps are usually used for convenience, to plot a journey, to answer a question on capital cities; but when combined with countermapping they can become a useful tool for researchers. For example, Landscapes of Border Control maps a total of 23 border control practices and detention centres across the world. Created by a group of academics at Oxford University, it’s intention is to expose the inhumane, and often hidden, practices that every country uses to suppress migrants and refugees. At the moment, Europe has the highest number of sites plotted (18), but the research is ongoing, and has been focused on Italy and Greece, so it is difficult to draw a conclusion. For instance, England has seven detention centres and only one is listed. However, it does offer an insight into the path of the journey that many refugees take. When coming from the Middle East of North Africa, the first stop many migrants make is in Greece, which leads to the large number of centres built to house them. As with many countries, Greece has a very inhumane way of dealing with the influx of refugees; instead of supporting their integration, the state locks them up in detention centres with incredibly poor facilities. This results in very low quality of life for the refugees, sometimes endangering their lives. For example, in Italy, during the first half of January two young men had already lost their lives while detained, it was assumed that both deaths were caused by violence inside the centre, by guards rather than other detainees. Detention centres, as with all places of mass incarceration, are riddled with power imbalance and violence; and the Border-Criminologies organisation aims to help tell the stories of detainees, and aid human rights defenders by using this map and their other resources. Another example of online countermapping is Queering the Map, a collaborative platform designed to record important queer experiences and where they happened. It was created and launched in 2017 by Lucas LaRochelle, with the intent of bringing the ‘queer internet culture’ to those that perhaps do not have access to it in real life, because of lack of safety or comfort. Another one of LaRochelle’s goals was to ‘contribute to discourses that think of queer space beyond places of consumption like bars, nightclubs, bookstores, bathhouses’ and dispel the harmful oversexualisation of homosexuality. It shows stories from queer individuals all over the world; they range from tales of heartbreak to discovery, and are all incredibly touching. When looking at the entries, they mostly correlate with population density, big cities are particularly overcrowded with pins, and the rural areas less so. However, it is clear that the countries with stricter marriage and sexuality laws have much fewer entries, many of them being simply songs of praise and sympathy for those who live there but do not have the right to be themselves. For example, in Russia an entry reads “I think I’m bisexual. I also live in a Muslim family and I really love my parents but they will never accept me”, and surrounding it are messages from other queer Muslims, promising good things for the future. While these messages are positive, it does not detract from the obvious power imbalances in those countries. Both of the examples above were created with the intent of helping others. Of course countermapping can simply be used for scientific purposes, but when combined with social reform, it becomes something far more impressive. In Landscapes of Border Control, the countermapping shows how governments have reacted to granting refugees their basic human rights (denied them). And with Queering the Map it shows how queer people rely on each other, and tend to gather in large cities, as they are often more accepting.

Bibliography

Cobarrubias, S 2010, ‘Countermapping’, in Warf, B (ed.), Encyclopedia of geography, SAGE Publications, Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 596, viewed 12 November 2020, doi: 10.4135/9781412939591.n227. Dorothy Kidd (2019) Extra-activism: countermapping and data justice, Information, Communication & Society, 22:7, 954-970, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1581243 O’Dwyer, L., Countermapping: cartography that lets the powerless speak, [online]. Available from https:// www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/mar/06/ counter-mapping-cartography-that-lets-the-powerlessspeak [Accessed November 9 2020] BorderCrim, 2020, The Landscapes of Border Control: Mapping border control and resistance, [online]. Available from https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/researchsubject-groups/centre-criminology/centrebordercriminologies/blog/2020/01/landscapes-border, [Accessed November 14 2020]. “Queering The Map.” Queering The Map, 2020, https://queeringthemap.com/.