This online webinar is part of In and Against the Fog of War: Mappings from the Front Line, a programme of live events, webinars and workshops organised by Livingmaps Network addressing the historical and contemporary links between war making and map making.
Jeremy Black – A Short History of War Maps in 20 minutes
In his presentation Jeremy will draw on his extensive research into war cartographies to outline what he sees as their main lines of historical development and their forms of variation, linking both continuities and change to the conditions of military operations and the geo-political framework in which they take place.
Jeremy Black is a military, diplomatic and cartographic historian who has written over a hundred books on a wide range of related topics. Among his most recent publications, relevant to his presentation are: Metropolis:mapping the city (2015), Military strategy: a global history ( 2020) and Geographies of War (2022): He is on the editorial boards of History Today, International History Review, Journal of Military History, Media History and editor of Archives.
Heather Ashley Hayes – Where the Map Breathes
Terror and torture, once the exclusive conditions of war and of distant others, now extend beyond military and political power into the cartography of our everyday lives. Heather explores two communicative technologies woven into modern cartography: defensive architecture projects mapped onto urban landscape design and facial recognition technology’s ubiquitous embeddedness throughout our lives. Looking to these as important developments in a struggle for imaginative geographies against racism, poverty, and inequality, we learn the changing ways that everyday people are subjected to the violence(s) of war, now without military spectacle. In her talk, Heather argues that resistive cartographies may embrace visuality, narrative, and technological disruption as part of a larger effort to build public space against these violence(s), openings that may function as the “lungs” of a geography; as Teju Cole notes, the space(s) where people go to breathe, to relax, to reflect, and to be.
Heather Ashley Hayes is a scholar, educator, writer, and organiser based in Portland, Oregon USA. She is author of Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography of the Terror Wars, an examination of the relationship between rhetoric and violence in post 9/11 society through the lens of cartography. Her second book, Struggle: Mapping the New Resistance is due out next year. Heather is appointed in the Department of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Lewis & Clark College where she additionally teaches in the Department of Middle East and North African Studies. She is the founder and director of nonprofit project The Teach Out, a multidisciplinary community-based learning network focused on providing opportunity and space to cut across barriers to educational access. It facilitates weekly seminars, book events, and retreats across more than fifteen US states and three countries.
Michael Shapiro – Mapping Occupation and Resistance in the Borderlands
In his presentation Michael will draw on his research in the violent eventspace that configures the shifting borderlands between Israel and Palestine as a case study in how the cartographic imaginary is mobilised in constructing architectures of occupation and resistance. He will show how Israel’s passive geometry of separation – focused around the wall and check points - has been supplemented with a more active geometry, a set of search and destroy tactics. He will also the way Palestinians regain mobility to make life liveable in response to the violence they face.
Michael Shapiro is Emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii. His writing and research has covered a wider range of topics in political theory and international relations. He is the author of Cartographies of violence, mapping cultures of war, in which he explores the social imaginary of war making and its popular representation in movies, military memoirs and TV recruiting commercials.