Welcome to Local Networks: Toward a Decolonial Map of Pullman.

This project takes as its focus the local area surrounding the City of Pullman, Washington, and the Washington State University campus. It seeks an alternative to the colonial logics of mapping which established colonial control of the land in the 18th and 19th centuries, and upon which our maps are still based today. In this pursuit, the project ultimately suggests that a partnership between community networks and digital tools can map the land according to lived experience in a useful, dynamic, and lasting way. You can follow the official project blog here.

Navigation

You may continue using the link at the bottom of each page, or navigate the book in any order using the menu in the upper left.

Selections 1-4 provide a theoretical basis for the project, and the final three sections provide critical looks at mapping and approaches to a decolonial map.

History

This project grew out of another project which I completed in early 2016, which sought to conceive of a new type of map, one which would actively counter what Ralph Cintron calls "discourses of measurement," those colonial demarcations of space upon which so much of our infrastructure still relies in many cities across America. That first project looked at a bit of Pullman's history, and you can see its DNA in this Scalar book, as well as some of the maps which I found in WSU's Manuscripts and Special Collections (MASC) when I first began looking at this topic. 

My solution to the problem of discourses of measurement in 2016 was initially to engage my own skills as a visual artist in order to provide a map which would give a general feeling of places and how they were connected by the values of a community, instead of by roads and zoning restrictions. For this, I surveyed current English graduate students in order to visualize some of the places which meant something to their lives.

Now, in 2018, the project has morphed into something quite different, yet still seeking the same goal: to envision a map which does not rest or rely upon the demarcated bones of colonial settlement, but one which draws upon the lived experience of a community in order to map the space differently. My research base has expanded accordingly outside of Cintron's work alone, getting at some of the key scholarly conversations happening around mapping, postcolonial thought, and the place-based practices of Native and Indigenous communities. Thinking of a decolonial map as a network has helped to situate a visual intervention which might usefully comment on colonial maps and their discourses of measurement. My first thought was that because this was a digital project, mining geotagged social media posts might be a useful way to map people's experiences of Pullman and surrounding areas via Tweets and Instagram posts, which I tried, and you can find that attempt in this section of the project, along with a few thoughts on the limitations of mapping in real time this way.

Moreover, though it might be interesting enough from a theoretical standpoint, a decolonial map should definitely benefit more than just me, and should definitely exist for the sake of more than research alone. For that reason I took the suggestion of Dr. Kim Christen to connect with WSU's Native Programs and attempt to provide a living map which might benefit incoming classes of WSU students. In communication with the staff, and having been so kindly invited to a handful of events in the Native Programs space on campus, I quickly found that a shared community map would be a useful project which could continue outside of the 560 graduate seminar. This final section contains the beginnings of that project.