“All of ‘em Things I haven’t Felt, I haven’t Seen;” Mapping Geographies for Collective Liberation

• In Event: Growing, Sharpening and Envisioning Our Tools: The Mapping Carcerality, Imagining Freedom, and (Re)Membering Selves Project

Abstract

Objective.
On any given day, more than 60,000 young people are incarcerated in one of the 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities in the United States (ACLU, n.d.), adding to an already bloated and egregiously disproportional racialized penal state (Wacquant, 2009) that disproportionally impacts the lives of multiply marginalized youth, families and communities. Normatively, carcerality tends to center the prison itself, disguising the complex geographies, circuits (Gill et al., 2018), and social relations that extend deep into the ideological, personal, affective, and somatic. Rising against this context, the objective of this paper––and the larger project it is situated within––is to document how maps and critical mapping can be a tool and praxis chartered towards liberatory goals, in this case the building of abolitionist futures in Los Angeles County.

Theoretical Framework.
Broadly, the theoretical backdrop for this paper builds upon the critical, decolonial, and participatory traditions. Thus, it honors the power and knowledge of those from whom counter-hegemonic notions derive and whose lives are deeply grounded in struggles (Gramsci, 2011); positions them as experts in their own lives (Cammarota & Fine, 2008); and cultivates collectives through which to create emancipatory horizons (ontology), build and sustain knowledge (epistemology), and create worlds where people are free (axiology and methodology). Conceptually, this project is in conversation with contemporary scholarship around carceral geographies (Moran, 2016), critical cartographies (Harley, 2002; McKittrick, 2006); and the multiple intersections between school systems and the logics and structures of carcerality (Rodriguez, 2006; Meiners & Winn, 2010).

Data and Methodology.
Following a set of participatory commitments, the strategies of inquiry were co-constructed alongside youth. Starting with a simple question (How do we get free?), the group designed and engaged in 5 exercises to identify the nodes, routes, pathways, and relationships that constitute that which tramples upon freedom: (1) temporal mapping; (2) mapping entanglements through encounters; (3) somatic mapping; and (4) critical educational maps. The data corpus included a combination of the maps, group dialogues, and personal reflections. Analysis took place collaboratively, iteratively, and was constituted of oscillating between our initial questions, the data corpus, and the wonder made possible through (un/re)doing all that continues to be absent and absurd within hegemonic and normative renderings of people, spaces, and times.

Findings and Significance
Resonating with previous struggles to imagine and charter more liberatory geographies (McKittrick, 2006), these collective exercises, importantly placed and in conversation with historical sites of struggle in Alabama, not uncovered the multiple ways in which maps are unfinished, changing, and continuously utilized as a tool for domination (Winther, 2020); but also rendered visible the multiple ways in which maps and mapping processes could work towards expanding our understandings of the “prison”, its ripples/tentacles, and the ways in which these shape us and our lives. In addition, these critical cartographies and their chartering towards a liberatory spirit (re)ontologized affective, spatial, and temporal landscapes by calling forth and making space for that which hadn’t been felt or seen; making space for being, imagining, moving, and struggling differently.

Authors

• Miguel Casar, University of Alabama

• Ka'Lee Matthews, Arts for Healing and Justice Network