Appropriating the genre of the campus map, graduate students at Queen Mary University London and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill have produced a countermap of the university. Elegant in design, yet multi-purposed, their mapping of alternative uses and critiques takes the form of a poster-sized doubled sided print which locates the university within its larger societal force field (the map’s front side), and stages an arena for playing that field by means of a board game (which appears on the reverse side). In sharp contrast to the political geography of curricula intended to assimilate students to an already settled matter and progress-toward-a-degree, an unproblematic temporal beat measured by accumulated credit-hours, the critical cartographical work of this collective reallocates the energies of their seminars and research to produce alternate forms of knowledge and means for its legitimation.
Articles by Countermapping Queen Mary Collective
Manuela Zechner
Manuela Zechner does post-creative research and struggle in and beyond London, currently focusing on how militant practices take care into account. Her long term engagements include the future archive, a PhD, and several collectives.
Tim Stallmann
Tim Stallmann is a member of the Counter-Cartographies Collective, where he first learned to make maps, and has also expanded into private practice as a cartographic consultant. In addition to counter-mapping, he kneads dough at an anti-capitalist community bakery and is inching towards a Master's degree in Geography.
Maria Catalina Bejarano Soto
Maria Catalina Bejarano Soto, a Colombian who migrated to London interested in learning more about geographies of migration, is now back in Colombia working in the public sector trying to make a difference in the implementation of public policy in rural areas.
Liz Mason-Deese
Liz Mason-Deese is a member of the Counter Cartographies Collective and Edu-Factory Collective and is interested in contemporary forms of labor and the politics of knowledge production. She currently resides in Buenos Aires where she is researching the struggles of the precarious and unemployed to create new ways of living in common.
Rakhee Kewada
Rakhee Kewada from Zimbabwe currently lives in London and studies issues of migration. She is soon hoping to pursue PhD research on immigration detention practices and the criminalisation of migrants.
Bue Rübner Hansen
Bue Rübner Hansen is establishing himself in the pitfalls between philosophy, political economy and plumbing after years of idle study and bursts of activity within the faltering student movements in UK and Denmark.
Mara Ferreri
Mara Ferreri has worked and studied between visual arts and urban geography, and is currently concerned with anti-gentrification struggles, urban transience, and work and life precarity.
Camille Barbagallo
Camille Barbagallo spent years fighting against the mandatory detention of refugees in Australia before migrating to London. She is currently researching neo-liberal restructuring of the home, gender and reproductive labour.