Shared Earth, Unequal Burdens: Living Maps for Environmental Justice

The conference theme is provoked by a year marked by almost daily news headlines of climate change; wildfires, floods, storms and drought and inspired by the resilience of activists rising up in protest to protect the well-being and lifeworlds of their communities. In the UK, climate activists have been given custodial Pr*son sentences and in Brazil, Indigenous campaigners stormed into the COP30 UN Climate Conference in Belém to insist their voices were heard on the fate of the Amazon, highlighting how environmental decision-making often excludes marginalised communities, who bear the disproportionate impacts of climate change and environmental degradation both at home and around the world.

Mapping, broadly understood as any visual, narrative or embodied expression of place or space, has become a powerful tool for revealing these inequities. Hugh Brody’s The Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project, carried out across the Canadian Arctic between 1974-7 in which we see ‘how Indian dreams and white dreams, Indians maps and white maps, collide’ (Brody 1981) is a landmark example in the history of environmental justice mapping. More recently, the Cancer Alley map of a densely industrialised ~85-mile stretch along Louisiana's Mississippi River shows toxic pollution impacting predominantly African American and low-income communities, leading to elevated cancer risks and environmental justice issues. In Latin America different forms of cuerpo-territorio, which include maps drawn on bodies or using body outlines, have been employed as a feminist practice to contest, for example, extractive industry on occupied Indigenous land. Environmental injustice is also produced through war, occupation, and the deliberate destruction of land and infrastructure. From Gaza to Kyiv and Khartoum, conflict generates toxic landscapes, polluted water systems, and ecologies of rubble, dust, and displacement.

Environmental justice mapping has evolved into diverse forms of knowledge production, generating empirical evidence for environmental action; drawing attention to experiential and embodied human–environment relationships through Black, feminist, LGBTQ+ and Queer geographies, and by decolonising and challenging dominant power relations. As an activist practice, map-making becomes a tool of resistance, enabling grassroots and collective engagement in struggles for climate, racial and social justice, while decentring top-down environmental expertise and destabilising conventional boundaries of knowledge production - reclaiming mapping as a practice through which more just and sustainable worlds are imagined and contested.

The conference programme will include talks, workshops/walks*, and an exhibition/drinks reception on the evening of Thursday 25th. We are delighted to have early confirmation of a number of sessions including, David Cross and Daksha Patel as keynote speakers; Zarina Ahmad of the Women's Environmental Network; a visit to the VR facility, Birkbeck Immersive Learning Centre; and a participatory network mapping activity running throughout the conference.

The conference takes place at Stewart House, Senate House, which is an accessible venue. Please contact us at [email protected] if you have accessibility, or any other requirements.

Teas and coffees will be provided (but not lunch).

* Workshops and walks are subject to a maximum capacity. Sign-up sheets for workshops/walks will be made available before the conference.

Please note that you do not need to purchase any tickets if you are presenting work or leading a workshop that has been accepted for the conference programme (maximum of one free pass per contribution).

Livingmaps Network is a volunteer-run organisation and was established in 2013 to develop a network of researchers, community activists, artists and others with a common interest in the use of countermapping for social change, public engagement, critical debate and creative forms of community campaigning.

100% of ticket sales go towards the costs of running Livingmaps e.g. events, journal and website.

Poster by Kremena Dimitrova Illustration www.kremenadimitrova.com

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