The Map is Not the Territory: Critical Geovisualization on the Armenian Border

This lecture will apply critical cartographic theory to border and territorial claimsmaking during the 2020 Karabakh war and its aftermath. In the wake of the war, the sudden appearance of a “hard” international border between Armenia and Azerbaijan and subsequent (ongoing) contention on border regularization thrust maps and mapping into the public eye. Putting emphasis on the social implications of technological changes in spatial representation, McGlynn will discuss the analytical shift necessary to make sense of “democratization” of geospatial tools in a time of violent conflict.

Evangeline McGlynn is a Geographer, currently working at the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Disaster Studies.