Mapping the City: A Stranger's Guide

Students working in Rubenstein Library

BorderWork(s) draws together critical perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and policy studies to explore the acts of division and demarcation—cartographic and representational, material and physical, political and economic, social and cultural—that have parceled up the inhabited world into bounded communities. The very act of slicing and dicing territory, whether on the ground or on paper, has been, in essence, the fundament of modern states and empires. Thus, what connects our scholarship and engagement with one another are our interconnected interests in the making and unmaking of borders and their boundless effects on our understanding of state, imperial, and corporate power, environmental rights and engagement with the natural world, the mobility or immobility of human communities (such as refugees), and their creative expression in a variety of artistic and visual media.   Borderwork(s) is part of the Franklin Humanities Institute, and supported by the Humanities Writ Large initiative at Duke University.

Within BorderWork(s), this exhibition-curating group consists of independent study students with interests across disciplines, from museum work and public history to urban planning and iOS app development. This group of students came together weekly to share ideas, work hard together, and prepare for the “Mapping Cities” exhibit. The group will take this experience to help with their next curatorial project, an exhibition on colonial cartography in the Nasher Museum of Art for Fall 2013.