News

I am excited to share that my my new book Free the Map. From Atlas to Hermes, a new cartography of borders and migration (nai010, 2024) has already gone into reprint. I am currently on a book tour—check the Upcoming Public Lectures section for details on my upcoming talks across Europe.

Book abstract
A map is a visual story of the world. It feeds our imagination and shapes our view of the world. A standard Atlas, however, predominantly tells only one story, that of the nation-state. The term ‘Atlas’ was coined by Mercator in the 16th century. He developed his world map to serve the desire for colonial navigation and appropriation of his time. From then on a standard Atlas uses this prism of the nation-state to portray the world. For centuries now, this has resulted in a world map – used in politics, education and the media – in which differences between state properties are foregrounded, people are uniformly packed into national containers and enclosed by borders, and migration is often represented as threatening invasion arrows (for the latter, see also our article on the migration map trap: https://lnkd.in/euxS-4B).

It is time to move beyond this state-centric cartography. This view of the world conceals people, history, internal differences, oligarchic powers, cross-border mobilities, and actual journeys. And it normalises nationalism, nativism and mass invasion fear. To paraphrase the surrealist painter Magritte, ‘Ceci n’est pas le monde‘. This is not the world.

Free the Map offers a radical shift in how we view and use maps. It makes a plea for a new cartographic story: a Hermes – the grandson of Atlas and the god of mobility and human connections. To this end, Rodrigo Bueno Lacy and I first discuss the huge political and societal impact of this state-centric fallacy of reducing a border to a line and migration to an arrow. Then, the book shows a large number of visually compelling alternative cartographic representations of borders and migration that humanize the map and show the world of global connections and relations.

Free the Map ends with a call to action. Various well-known artists, designers, and cartographers (Tofe Al-Obaidi, Catalogtree, Yishay Garbasz, Susanne KTofe Al-Obaidi, Catalogtree, Yishay Garbasz, Susanne Khalil Yusef, Nicolas Lambert, Sarah Mekdjian, Ruben Pater, Philippe Rekacewicz, Malkit Shoshan, Jonas Staal, Irene Stracuzzi, Annelys de Vet, Jasmijn Visser, Denis Wood) offer exciting ready-to-use, map-liberating challenges for education and public Maplabs. These briefings are also freely accessible at https://freethemap.org/

Free the Map is produced and designed by De Vormforensen.

The book can be ordered at nai010 publishers

 

Latest media articles and interviews

Prize for best article 

We are honoured to have received the John Urry Prize of the Journal ‘Mobilities’ for our article ”The migration map trap. On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migration” (2020) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17450101.2019.1676031 The jury report: ”this excellent article has clear, compelling writing and images; smart, original analysis of the problems of migration cartography, wonderful analysis of a variety of maps, and very nice counter-mapping and mobile mapping examples. It is also an important intervention in policy debates around migration through unpacking the power of visual representations. It exemplifies the kinds of migration and border studies that are of interest to the Mobilities journal, building on John Urry’s interests in mapping, visual representation, and historical analysis along with critical mobility studies relevant to current political issues.” Hopefully, the prize helps in raising awareness of the power of maps and the not innocent fallacies of the invasion-like cartography of migration.