Counterpoints: An Atlas of Displacement and Resistance
This is the second event in the programme FRONT LINES, BACK YARDS
– Monthly online events exploring the local frontlines of our multiple crises and drawing on the innovative forms of social and cultural mapping emerging from the backyards created during lockdown.
In this event, join co-editors and designers of Counterpoints: An Atlas of Displacement and Resistance in a conversation about the conceptual origins of the Atlas and its relevance in the current local and global context of the pandemic, racial uprisings, and economic inequity. The discussion will focus on the design aesthetics of the Atlas and chapter contents. We conclude with perspectives on how collaborative storytelling serves as a pathway towards resistance and hope during these challenging times.
About Counterpoints
Counterpoints combines work from within the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) with contributions from dozens of local artists, organisers, scholar-activists, and residents – from longtime community members who have been fighting multiple waves of racial dispossession to elementary school youth envisioning de-colonial futures. As an atlas co-created with community, Counterpoints expands knowledge on displacement and resistance in the Bay Area with, rather than for or about, those most impacted.
Counterpoints is organised around seven thematic chapters: (1) Evictions and Root Shock; (2) Indigenous Geographies of Resistance; (3) Health and Environmental Justice; (4) Gentrification and State Violence; (5) Transportation, Infrastructure, and Economy; (6) Migrations/Relocations; and (7) Speculation and Speculative Futures. These chapters, chosen based on AEMP's years of work in the Bay Area, together provide a more regional, historically grounded, and multiply situated perspective for understanding the complexities of living in and fighting for space in the Bay Area than ever available before. From settler colonialism to the Tech Boom 2.0, Counterpoints gives readers the data, stories, analyses, and inspiration needed to fight for urban justice in the contemporary world.
With over 225 illustrations, photographs, and data visualisations; and 120,000 words of essays, poetry, oral histories, and more, Counterpoints is full of data to get organised around; stories to be inspired by; and essays and artworks to imagine a more just future with.
The Speakers:
Erin McElroy is a cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s AI Now Institute. Erin received a PhD in Feminist Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz, and is an editor of the Radical Housing Journal.
Mary Shi is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of California Berkeley. She grew up on the fringes of the Bay Area and is committed to grappling with the Bay Area in all of its complexity and celebrating the power of partial perspective.
Deland Chan teaches in the Program on Urban Studies at Stanford University and is a doctoral student in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford. She currently serves on the San Francisco Planning Commission.
Elizabeth (Isa) Knafo is a publication designer, anti-capitalist researcher, and documentary filmmaker. She has worked for several years with anti-gentrification, housing justice, and anti-artwashing movements in Los Angeles, including AEMP-LA. Isa has designed and published movement papers and graphics since the early 2000s.
Terra Graziani is a researcher and tenants’ rights organiser based in Los Angeles, CA. She founded and co-directs the Los Angeles chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a digital storytelling collective documenting dispossession and resistance in solidarity with gentrifying communities through research, oral history, and data work. She is also a researcher with the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy and The Centre for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA. Before this, she organised with AEMP in the San Francisco Bay Area and worked for several tenants’ rights organisations including The Los Angeles Centre for Community Law and Action, The Eviction Defence Collaborative and Tenants Together. She is currently Research Program Officer at Educopia where she facilitates collective knowledge production and preservation in the information field. Terra earned her Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning at UCLA and her Bachelor’s degree in Social and Cultural Geography at UC Berkeley.
Livingmaps Network is an independent not for profit organisation, we receive no core funding. Our main income comes from live events which we have been unable to organise this year. We are asking for donations of £3 – £5 from people who wish to attend our online events to help us cover our running costs. We greatly appreciate your support.
WHEN: Nov 18th 2020, 18:00 (GMT)