Unmapping Campus Environments: Critical Cartographic Research Methods and Higher Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 53
  In Roundtable Session: Space and Place in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Unmapping draws attention to the many ways that social values and power relations have been ‘concretized’ and located within postsecondary campus environments. As a participatory or individual inquiry practice, unmapping draws upon critical cartography and Razack’s (2002) book Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping White Settler Society to defamiliarize the higher education campus in ways that might prompt moments of ‘epistemic friction’ in order to denaturalize existing colonial legacies, historiographic absences, or institutionalized patterns of discrimination (Medina, 2013). These moments of disruption and reflection are opportunities from which to generate new insights about the impact of campus environments on students and the relationship between higher education and a re-contextualized notion of the ‘public’ (Seawright, 2014).

Authors

• Amy Scott Metcalfe, The University of British Columbia

• Sharon Stein, The University of British Columbia