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Geography Awareness Week 2023

Graphic for Geography Awareness Week 2023 showing a map and model boat in the background

Join us for three upcoming events as we celebrate Geography Awareness Week November 13-17, 2023.

Event 1 | UTAGS International Potluck

The undergraduate club for geography and sustainability students, UTAGS, is hosting an international potluck on Monday November 13, 2023 in Burchfiel Geography Building Room 104. Sign up to bring a dish using this Google spreadsheet.

UTAGS Presents International Potluck, November 13 11 a.m. - 1 p.m., BGB-104
Join us on Monday November 13, 2023 for an international potluck.

Event 2 | Lunch and Learn via Lillian Stimson Mentoring Program

Margaret Pearce is Citizen Potawatomi tribal member and cartographer living on Penobscot homelands in Maine. A 2023 Guggenheim fellow, she holds a PhD in geography from Clark University and served as a university geography professor for 15 years before dedicating herself to cartography full-time as an independent artist. Much of her cartographic work engages with Native tribes and addresses indigenous place-based histories and environmental geographies. She is currently at work on a project about Inuit Nunangat and industrial carbon pollution. Dr. Pearce will discuss her career journey, the current focus of her publicly engaged cartographic work, advice for up and coming professionals, and role that ethics, accountability, and community engagement can and should play in the geospatial field.   

  • Location: Baker Center Toyota Auditorium
  • Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm ET
  • Date: Thursday November 16, 2023
  • Full details here
Map showing the Lunch and Learn is at the Baker Center for Public Policy

Event 3 | Distinguished Speaker

Making Room: Cartography as a Way of Writing

with Dr. Margaret Pearce

Graphic showing events in history and where they occurred on a map

What if you practiced cartography not as tech, but as writing? How would that change the work you contribute in the world? In this time of inattention and complacency, writing through cartography can be a powerful intervention and antidote. To show you what I mean, I’ll take a deep dive into two recent projects that deal with topics many people would rather avoid thinking about: the profiting of universities from expropriated Indigenous lands under the Morrill Act (the Land-Grab Universities investigation for High Country News), and the U.S. government’s violent expulsions of Ho-Chunk and Myaamia governments and citizens from their homelands (the Removals maps for the Field Museum). I hope to leave you daydreaming about how you might change up your own mapping practice, to make room for telling things the way they need to be told.

A photo of a blonde woman with shoulder-length hair in the forest
  • Location: Strong Hall Room 101
  • Time: 4:10 – 5:40 pm ET
  • Date: Thursday November 16, 2023
  • Event Flier (pdf)
  • Full Details here
A map pointing to Strong Hall with an orange arrow

Cover Photo by Lara Jameson