Seminar 15: Contested Ground: Rhetorical Cartography as Theory and Method

Leaders: Timothy Barney (University of Richmond) and Heather Ashley Hayes (University of Alabama)

Maps make arguments. They naturalize borders, render some places central and others
peripheral, and convert contested terrain into apparent neutrality. This seminar explores
rhetorical and cultural cartography on two fronts. First, as an object of rhetorical analysis
and second, as a method for doing rhetorical scholarship. Over three and a half days,
participants will move between close readings of maps as persuasive, world-shaping
texts and hands-on experimentation with cartography as an analytic practice, a way of
locating rhetoric(s) in space, tracing their circulation, and visualizing the rhetorical
geographies and landscapes that organize public life.

We will work across cartographic traditions and contemporary cases including imperial
and military mapping, data visualization and the politics of the dashboard & organizing
algorithm, digital and counter-mapping, and the spatial rhetorics of memory, mobility,
and access. Throughout, we ask what it means to treat the map, and cartography itself,
not as illustration but as rhetoric, and what becomes possible when rhetorical scholars
map and trace landscapes as a way of seeing.

The seminar is designed for participants at any career stage who work on space, place,
the body, visualization, materiality, public memory, or the rhetoric of science and
technology, and for those curious about developing richer approaches to cartographic
and/or spatial methods. Participants will leave with enhanced vocabularies for rhetorical
and cultural cartography, a set of analytic approaches they can carry into their own
projects, and a draft cartographic intervention developed during the week. No technical
or design background is assumed.

Note from the organizers:
As per previous workshops, there may be pre-reading and pre-work required before June. Your leaders will reach out to you some time after registration with additional details.