ETHNOGRAPHY &amp DESIGN: MUTUAL PROVOCATIONS (CoLED Conference)

This workshop will begin with a presentation of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project - a critical cartography, oral history, and digital storytelling collective documenting the dispossession and resistance of San Francisco Bay Area residents in the wake of the Tech Boom (www.antievictionmap.com). Attention will be focused narrative mapping, as I look at the project’s oral history map (http://antievictionmappingproject.net/narratives.html), its call-the-wall mural (https://antievictionmap.squarespace.com/mural-in-clarion-alley), its ethnographic zine, and its interactive video platform. I will go on to describe our methods of collaborative map-making, data gathering, and data interpretation, highlighting how we combine narrative and quantitative data to sharpen analytic connections. This will allow an introduction to contemporary theorizations of feminist data visualization and counter-cartography. This introduction will invoke questions as to what it means to create mapping tools for movement building with (rather than for) communities impacted most by displays of Tech Boom-induced systems of racial capitalism, and how to begin doing so. I will address what it means to create collective digital technologies that both entangle and critique the material impacts of corporate technological interfaces. In describing our methodologies, we will facilitate a conversation with workshop participants around multiple techniques for spatializing displacement and loss, highlighting several visualizing tools and workflows. At the same time, I will lead a discussion about how collaborative design and ethnographic practice can also reframe narratives of dispossession to those of resistance and community power. In doing so, I will discuss our community asset mapping work, and facilitate a community asset mapping exercise amongst workshop participants. Participants will leave the workshop with new understandings of Bay Area gentrification, collective cartographic design practice, feminist data visualization, and narrative framing. There will also be ample time to address technical questions participants might have about data collection and visualization, our technology stack, as well as about ethnographic cartographic design.