In spring 2022, Dr. Banazek and Dr. Magrane co-taught an interdisciplinary graduate/undergraduate seminar focused on geohumanities, rhetoric, place, representation, and environment. Students developed group StoryMap projects engaging with our place and region.
Course Description
Representations—whether they take linguistic, imagistic, cartographic, or multimedia forms—are never neutral; rather they reflect, reproduce, distort, and enable various power structures, cultural dynamics, and ways of knowing. In this course, we will explore the complexity of representing place and space by critiquing, designing, and building digital Story Maps together. Students will explore environments near Las Cruces, learn from community partners, and work in teams to develop major Story Map projects. Projects will develop out of the interests and expertise of students in the class; they may include things like: presenting local oral histories cartographically; mapping public health issues; presenting human and non-human histories together; telling multi-generation family stories in multimedia formats; or building Story Maps for community partners based on their needs, goals, and target audiences. Reading that grounds our practices will cover geohumanities and narrative methodologies, Indigenous and feminist counter-mapping traditions, and conversations in critical media studies. This course aims to break down divisions between the humanities, arts, social, and natural sciences. No technical experience is required; the course will include instruction in use of Esri Story Mapping tools, which use cloud-based software to combine cartographic representations with text, images, and multimedia content. RPC graduate students can request permission from their advisors to count this as a methods-intensive course.
View students' group StoryMap projects.
"I think that a lot of thinking went into structuring this course because it is like nothing I have experienced before, GEOHISTORHETORICLITERATURE." - seminar student.