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Dr. Clancy Wilcott 
Assistant Professor 
University of California, Berkeley 

Abstract: 

This talk discusses a series of critical cartographic interventions undertaken in collaboration between local Indigenous, activist and community groups, and studio.geo?, a cartographic research and teaching studio based at UC Berkeley. It centers on Before You Are Here, one of a series of ongoing collaborative research projects making maps with the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust (STLT) an Indigenous, Urban, Women-Led organization seeking to rematriate the land in East Bay, California. This series of works reimagines cartography, a historically colonial tool of territorialization, for telling stories of Indigeneity, sovereignty and multiplicity in Sogorea Te’s view of the Ohlone Bay Area. Together, we asked: what would it mean to decolonise at the level of the fundamentals of cartography itself and produce a map that depicts a cosmography, rather than a cartography, a living world rather than abstracted data, a map that wrenches open notions of universality and standardization to represent the landscape of the Bay as a series of seasonal space-times through which communities of people live and move, a space uncomputable rather than a fixed fact: an “Indigenous depth of place” (Pierce and Louis, 2007)?

Speaker Bio:

Clancy Wilmott (PhD) is Assistant Professor of Critical Cartography, Geovisualization and Design in the Department of Geography and the Berkeley Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on intricacies of power inherent in spatial representations, including mapping, cartography and GIS from an anti-colonial perspective.