Mapping Futures, Mapping Life: Digital Survival Skills for #QueerYouthGeographers

• In Event: Engaging Education Work in and With LGBTQ+ People and Communities

Abstract

This presentation centers a digital mapping project of LGBTQ street youth. Thinking with the FemTechNet Collective (2018) and Taylor (2017) about mobile practices as mappings across the hemisphere, I have found that queer homeless youth are not only developing practices of digital improvisation to leverage their own basic needs of food, shelter, and basic health care needs (Author A, 2016), but are also using mobile technologies as markers of movement and relation in digital spaces. This ethnographic data was collected as part of a longitudinal study of 45 LGBTQ homeless youth between the ages of 14-21 in a large urban youth center in the United States.

Under new conditions of forced displacement and the practices of “exchange and barter” that are necessary for survival, youth digital mapping not only documents migration across the U.S., but also documents the urgency of movement across time and space. These digital maps are queer youthscapes, where successfully negotiating issues of safety and surveillance are central in youth geographies, where vital information is posted and documented for other migrant queer youth. I am arguing that the urgency and precarity of this kind of geo-documentation across digital spaces needs to be recognized as youthscapes of knowledge, resistance, and trans-survival. The use of mobile technologies in the new climate of surveillance both on and offline reflects new conditions of increased state control, where youth share knowledge with others in order to navigate access to the technologies necessary to survive massive change, forced migration, and displacement.

Author

• Cindy Cruz, University of Arizona