Experimenting with creative geographic methods in The Critical Futures Visual Archive

About The CFVA

The CFVA accompanied the Envisioning the Future of Critical Geographies conference at Pennsylvania State University in October 2017. I curated the exhibit, which showcased creative works by 18 scholars, artists, and activists. As the exhibit’s curatorial statement describes,

The Critical Futures Visual Archive explores the intersection of geographic knowledge, visual representation, and creative expression as a site for critical thought, knowledge production, and practice in our hallways and beyond.

The archive experiments with alternative modes of geographic thought, experience, and representation, engaging themes of militarization, gentrification, race, place, identity, diaspora, violence, gender, social (in)justice, memory, representation, landscape, borders, and space.

This brief reflection on the CFVA presents select pieces from the collection (those by geographers) and considers what they contribute to the practice of geographic research and scholarship. Given that these works were installed in the hallways of the Pennsylvania State University Department of Geography (where some still remain), I also reflect on the potentials for creative works to intervene in the material and institutional space of the department, as well as the identity of geography more broadly.

Water: Coloring our Future. Sea Level Rise in New York City (Carolyn Fish, Figure 1) is a series of watercolor maps that ‘illustrate 500 year flood heights in 2100 (medium blue) and 2300 (light blue) due to sea level rise [in New York City] based on recent research’. This project emerged from Fish’s dissertation research, which examines how cartographic design can best communicate climate change to the public. She explains,

Researchers in climate change communication have shown that simply understanding the issue and its effects is often not enough for a person to change their behaviors. Emotional connection, plus knowledge, is vital to changing behaviors toward mitigation and adaptation . . . It was through applying pigment and water directly to each block . . . that I became not only immersed in the effects climate change but able to evaluate the changes that will take place on this well-known landscape.

Along with well-designed, interactive, and dynamic climate change maps, these artistic renderings of the effects of climate change can contribute to raising awareness, sharing knowledge, and processing the lived impacts and emerging challenges posed by a changing climate.

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Figure 1.

Water: Coloring our Future. Sea Level Rise in New York City (Carolyn Fish). This series of watercolor maps illustrate 500-year flood heights in 2100 (medium blue) and 2300 (light blue) due to sea level rise in New York City based on recent research. ⁹ Map design by Fish. This work is licensed by Carolyn Fish under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Reproduced with permission.

Rubble Landscapes as Archives for Critical Futures (Jia-Ching Chen, Figures 2 and 3) is a photographic series depicting the impacts of development on the landscapes of rural China. Chen uses visual methods to gesture toward the changing meanings, uses, and forms of landscapes produced through uneven development. He reflects,

Dispossession is frequently narrated as a single moment of compliance in reaction to state force. These landscapes tell a much more complicated story as the overturned people, things and forces that continue to inhabit and traverse them produce contradictory outcomes and experiences.

Chen’s ethnographic photography captures the tumultuous and contradictory effects of rapid, uneven development and the new landscapes it produces. He imagines these images as part of a geographic archive, one whose incomplete narrative trajectories might reorganize connections between the past, present, and possible futures. Through a critical reading of development’s rubble landscapes, Chen suggests, we might further interrogate the uneven spatialities and ruptured temporalities that produce development as dispossession, allowing us to reconsider what kind of futures might be excavated from the rubble.

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Figure 2.

Rubble Landscape of Yanhedang Village (Jia-Ching Chen). September 2017, Yixing City. For over 7 years, a few evicted residents of Yanhedang have reclaimed, rebuilt, and then maintained small plots of land to cultivate beans, squash, sesame, oil flowers, and other crops for subsistence and a small amount of cash. In the foreground, piles of new demolition rubble are dumped each day to be mined for valuable material.

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Figure 3.

Rubble Landscape of Yongding Village (Jia-Ching Chen). September 2017, Nanjing City. Limned by rising resettlement towers and barely discernible in the thickening gray suspension and overgrowth, the village and farmlands of Yongding (meaning ‘forever settled’) appear to have been forgotten for decades. Yet, the villagers’ final harvest was only taken in during the previous year. The land is not being prepared for construction and villagers have not been allowed to return. As it lied fallow, it was designated for the development of ‘high standard agricultural land’ – one of the few permitted reuses of protected prime farmland.

Everyday Banalities at Mumbai’s Industrial Peripheries (Aparna Parikh, Figures 4 and 5) are ethnographic sketches from Parikh’s research examining transformations in Mumbai’s built environment. Through this work, she documented the everyday lives of male workers who often moved to industrial areas without their families. Parikh remarks,

When I began conducting research in Bhiwandi, I conducted an in-depth documentation of their daily lives and habits . . . I found hand drawings an effective way to take notes as well as juxtapose everyday acts with the decrepit industrial infrastructure that forms the backdrop for sustenance . . . [D]rawing as an ethnographic research method helped me distill aspects I found significant, and the process of drawing revealed non-linear relations between people and their context.

Parikh’s methodological approach is part of a growing interest in drawing as an ethnographic method.^10–11 Indeed, drawings capturing the look and feel of everyday life can contribute to ethnography’s ‘thick description’, allowing audiences to engage with unfamiliar research contexts while challenging researchers to see their research sites and subjects in new ways.

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Figure 4.

From Everyday Banalities at Mumbai’s Industrial Peripheries (Aparna Parikh). This work is licensed by Aparna Parikh under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Figure 5.

From Everyday Banalities at Mumbai’s Industrial Peripheries (Aparna Parikh). This work is licensed by Aparna Parikh under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Through My Grandparents’ Eyes: On Diaspora and Landscape Photography (Christabel Devadoss) is a photographic series depicting various geographic sites throughout the lives of the artist and her family (view the described works at: http://www.christabeldevadoss.com/personal-projects). Devadoss juxtaposes photographs taken by her grandfather between 1950 and 1975 with images she captured of the same sites (in this case, in India and Italy), exploring the potential of landscape photography to capture the meanings of diaspora. Devadoss reflects,

As an artist and photographer, I use visuals and landscape photography to interact with diaspora and experiences of my family in very personal ways. Through these photos, I engage with diaspora through specific memories and family history . . . while simultaneously challenging the notion that landscape photography is objective and devoid of intimate human connection.

According to Devadoss, work on diaspora often misses the more intangible dynamics – memories, experiences, feelings – that shape and give meaning to the movements of individuals and communities. Devadoss’ creative fusion of landscape photography, diaspora studies, and biographical storytelling demonstrates the potential for creative approaches to geographic representation to make new methodological, conceptual, and embodied connections between geographic sites, processes, and meanings.

What Happened to Sandra Bland? Two Years Later (Jenna Christian) is a selection from an ongoing series of graphic art produced by Christian as part of her research in Houston, Texas. ¹² Christian’s research examines the ‘school-to-military pipeline’ – a pathway through which predominantly low-income youth of color are recruited to the US military through Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs in their high schools. Like Parikh, Christian used visual fieldnotes to capture these everyday spaces of youth recruitment and training.

During fieldwork and as a practice of scholarship-activism, Christian also contributed her skills to social movements like #BlackLivesMatter, producing protest signs (see Figure 6) and graphic narratives about ongoing police violence against communities of color. Her engagement with graphic art as a mode of scholar-activism provides an inspiring example of the multiple potentials of creative methodologies in geographic research and demonstrates how critical-creative geographic scholarship might contribute to an alternative archive of state violence and resistance to it.

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Figure 6.

Jenna Christian leads protest printmaking workshop using her original designs. During breaks, conference participants printed ‘Defend DACA’, ‘#Black Lives Matter’, ‘Native Lives Matter’, ‘Build Bridges Not Walls’, and other designs on postcards and posters.

Envisioning the future of critical-creative geographies

As I hope this brief reflection on the CFVA makes clear, creative approaches open up exciting avenues for scholarship in geography. For instance, Parikh and Christian highlight the value of creative ethnographic methods in engaging their research sites, while Chen and Devadoss explore documentary practices that challenge conventional approaches to their subjects. Fish and Christian develop compelling ways of communicating their work to broader audiences, while Chen and Christian employ the power of the visual to intervene in ‘official’ narrative frames that underwrite, obscure, and rationalize institutionalized violence.

However, like any emerging body of thought and practice, more experimentation, debate, and critical reflection are required to further develop the potentials and examine the limitations of this creative (re)turn. I close by highlighting some of the challenges and opportunities that arose in the course of this project which may be instructive for other geographers seeking to engage the creative (re)turn.

Retrospectively, the exhibit’s ephemerality emerged as a key limitation in further developing the potentials of creative interventions, both in the everyday material space of the department and in the larger institutional space of the discipline. Although some of the art remains in the hallways of the department, the exhibit as a whole has since been disassembled. Furthermore, in so far as some of the works (not featured here; forthcoming in another article) were installations, performance pieces, and photographic ‘interventions’ that relied on the installation space to produce their meanings, the question of archiving the exhibit becomes yet more complex. When such works engage in site-specific critiques and interventions, their meanings can be difficult to capture and translate to distant audiences, necessitating creative and embodied accounts of the work they accomplish in those spaces. However, as creative geographies gain more visibility, avenues are emerging for archiving and interpreting such works, including, for instance, the Curations section and online curation platform provided by GeoHumanities and this section of cultural geographies. However, attempts to create more institutionalized spaces for creative works are needed and might be pursued at the level of individual departments or at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting, for example.

As for the opportunities presented by the CFVA itself, I am most excited by the everyday interventions it performed in the department’s hallways during the conference and long afterward. The exhibit allowed a space for participants to present their creative works as geographic scholarship, as work they do as geographers. This is to say that it effected a small, but not insignificant, intervention into our institutional identity, into the definition of what geography is or could be. While this may seem like a rather abstract claim, its meaning becomes concrete in small, everyday ways.

For instance, one afternoon, a month or two after the conference, I overheard the department head curating a set of refugee portraits (from the exhibit) in the hallway for a visitor, explaining that our department was one site in a citywide exhibit to raise awareness about the refugee crisis. The department head saw me sitting nearby and asked whether I would talk to the visitor, an undergraduate student in her cartography class, about art and geography. The student, a major in materials science with a long-standing interest in performing arts, nervously sat on the couch in the grad lounge, asking me questions about geography. I did my best to explain the scope of the unwieldy discipline to her, explaining how performance art and the sciences could coexist under the banner of geography. For the entire conversation, she looked stunned, yet captivated in a moment of ‘discovering’ what geography was. It is such moments, moments of discovery and imagination, that I hope creative interventions might render visible, foster, and sustain. Creative interventions, then, might not only inspire cultural geographers to explore new methods and approaches, but also work to transform the identity of geography, producing new possibilities for discipline as a whole.

Months after the conference’s conclusion, much of the artwork remained in the hallways. Undergraduates were overheard asking, ‘Why can’t we have paintings in our hallways?’ while inhabitants of the floor commented on how much the art changed the atmosphere. Six months after the conference, some artworks still remain in the halls, scattered among this semester’s output of undergraduate scientific poster assignments that have long dominated the aesthetics of departmental space.

Perhaps, then, it is not unreasonable to imagine that the exhibit left a trace on this institutional space, rendering visible the more ‘marginal’ imaginaries of geographic scholarship that proliferate below the surface of ‘official’ conventions. We might think of these pieces as holding a little wall space for another vision of geographical knowledge, marking a space for a geography yet to come into being, a geography in the midst of creation.