Keynote Speaker

Shannon Mattern is a Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, all published by University of Minnesota Press. She contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places, a journal focusing on architecture, urbanism, and landscape, and she collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. You can find her at wordsinspace.net. 

Panel 1 Speakers: Mapping Racial Violence

Monica Muñoz Martinez, is Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brown University and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2017-2019).  At Brown University she offers courses in Latinx studies, immigration, histories of violence, histories of policing, and public memory in US History. Her research has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, the Brown University Office of Vice President of Research, and the Texas State Historical Association. Her first book, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in the Texas, was awarded the Lawrence Levine Award, Organization of American Historians; the Best Non-Fiction Book Award, National Association for Chicano Chicana Studies Tejas FOCO; and was a finalist for the Fredrick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians.  Martinez is the primary investigator for Mapping Violence, a digital project that documents histories of racial violence in Texas. She is a founding member of the non-profit organization Refusing to Forget that calls for a public reckoning with racial violence in Texas, and is a faculty fellow at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities.

Jim McGrath is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Public Humanities at Brown’s Center for Public Humanities. At Brown Jim supports various digital initiatives, including Mapping Violence. Before coming to Brown Jim was Project Co-Director of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, an award-winning digital humanities project. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Digital Humanities Quarterly, History@Work, and elsewhere. Jim is on Twitter @JimMc_Grath.

Margaret Burnham joined the Northeastern University School of Law faculty in 2002. Her fields of expertise are civil and human rights, comparative constitutional rights, and international criminal law. She is the founder of the School of Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), which conducts research and supports policy initiatives on anti-civil rights violence in the United States and other miscarriages of justice during the period 1930-1970. CRRJ serves as a resource for scholars, policymakers and organizers involved in various initiatives seeking justice for these crimes. In 2010, Professor Burnham headed a team of outside counsel and law students in a landmark case that settled a federal lawsuit: Professor Burnham’s team accused Franklin County Mississippi law enforcement officials of assisting Klansmen in the kidnapping, torture and murder of two 19-year-olds, Henry Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. The case and settlement were widely covered in the national press.  Professor Burnham began her career at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In the 1970s, she represented civil rights and political activists. In 1977, she became the first African American woman to serve in the Massachusetts judiciary, when she joined the Boston Municipal Court bench as an associate justice. In 1982, she became partner in a Boston civil rights firm with an international human rights practice. In 1993, South African president Nelson Mandela appointed Professor Burnham to serve on an international human rights commission to investigate alleged human rights violations within the African National Congress. The commission was a precursor to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Melissa Nobles is the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Nobles’ research and teaching have focused on the comparative study of racial and ethnic politics, and issues of retrospective justice. Her current research centers on constructing a database of racial killings in the American South, 1930–1954. Working closely as a faculty collaborator and advisory boardmember of Northeastern Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice law clinic, Nobles has conducted extensive archival research, unearthing understudied and more often, unknown deaths and contributing to legal investigations. She is the author of two books, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford University Press, 2000), The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and co-editor with Jun-Hyeok Kwak of Inherited Responsibility and Historical Reconciliation in East Asia (Routledge Press, 2013).

Geoff Ward is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is also a faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology and American Culture Studies. His scholarship focuses broadly of the racial politics of social control and the pursuit of racial justice, historically and today. In addition to numerous research articles and essays, he is the author of The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2012), an award-winning book on the rise, fall, and haunting remnants of Jim Crow juvenile justice. Current projects further examine histories of racial violence, their legacies, and implications for repair. These include The Racial Violence Archive, a digital resource for research, teaching, and engagement, and the exhibition, “Truths and Reckonings: The Art of Transformative Racial Justice,” opening at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in Spring 2020.

David Cunningham is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. One of the university’s inaugural hires in the re-formed Department of Sociology, he came to WashU in 2015 from his previous appointment as Sociology Chair at Brandeis University. His research examines the causes, dynamics, and legacies of racial violence, with an emphasis on the historical and contemporary mobilization of white supremacist action. His latest book Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, CBS News, the Miller Center Forum, and in a PBS American Experience documentary film. An instructor and Executive Board member for Washington University’s Prison Education Project, he has received multiple awards for teaching and mentorship, as well as the 2019 Robin M. Williams Award for Distinguished Contributions to Scholarship, Teaching, and Service given by the Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section of the American Sociological Association.

Mariah Tso is a GIS Specialist at the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA with the Million Dollar Hoods Project. Mariah received her master’s degree in geographic information systems from the University of Redlands and her bachelor’s in environment, economics, and politics from Scripps College. Her research interests include critical cartography, indigenous methodologies, and interdisciplinary storytelling.

Panel 2 Speakers: Participatory Mapping in Social Practice Art and Design

Rosten Woo is an artist, designer, and writer living in Los Angeles. His projects aim to help people understand complex systems, re-orient themselves to places, and participate in group decision-making. He acts as a collaborator and consultant to a variety of grassroots organizations including Little Tokyo Service Center, the Black Workers Center, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and Esperanza Community Housing Corporation, as well as the city of Los Angeles, and the California State Parks. His work has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and various piers, public housing developments, shopping malls, and parks. He is co-founder and former executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), winner of the 2016 National Design Award for institutional achievement. His book Street Value about race and retail urban development was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2009.

Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist and counter-cartographer. Her work intersects the fields of popular education, cultural production, public policy, and mapping. She creates maps and mappings that produce new understandings of social and political issues. She has mapped public parks in Los Angeles; future territorial disputes in the Arctic; and wastewater economies in New York City. She is co-editor of the book/map collection An Atlas of Radical Cartography, a project that significantly influenced the conversation and production around mapping and activism.  Exhibitions include the Sharjah (U.A.E.), Gwangju (South Korea) and Pittsburgh Biennials, “Greater New York” at PS1, and “Experimental Geography.” She has lectured extensively about her work nationally and internationally, including at the 2013 Creative Time Summit. She has been an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and the NYC Urban Field Station, and is a current LMCC/Governor’s Island artist-in-residence.  

Gwen MacGregor is a visual artist and geographer working across the disciplines of installation, video, photography, and geographic scholarship. She has artworks in collections such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Oakville Galleries and the Royal Bank Collection. Recent exhibitions include The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario and Phoenix Projects Athens, Greece. She has exhibited extensively internationally and has also participated in numerous international art residencies including the International Studio Curatorial Program in New York. She is a Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Award holder and is represented by MKG127 in Toronto. MacGregor is a PhD Candidate in Geography at The University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores the constructions and contestations of nationhood in contemporary art practices presented at art biennales. An article of her geographic scholarship on the Canadian/USA border on the Great Lakes is forthcoming in the cross-disciplinary journal Intermédialité.

Sandra Rechico has long maintained a studio practice in drawing, photography, installation and object-making where she regularly looks at maps, routing, wayfaring, navigation and distance. She is also interested in the residue and detritus from walks, and their representation. Rechico also has a long history of site-specific work, responding to the galleries or locations where she is located. She has been involved in numerous community projects, the most significant being the co-curator of WADE, a series of temporary public art projects commissioned from artists that took place in the city of Toronto’s wading pools. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph, where she is coordinator of the Master of Fine Arts program in studio art. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and is held in many public and private collections. Rechico has exhibited and participated in artist residencies across Canada, in Europe and Australia.

Elisa H. Hamilton is a socially engaged multimedia artist who creates inclusive artworks that emphasize shared spaces and the hopeful examination of our everyday places, objects, and experiences. She has been the recipient of four public art grants to create temporary public works in Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood, and a Creative City grant from New England Foundation for the Arts.  Projects include “Sound Lab,” a community sound project that was featured in “Listen Hear: The Art of Sound” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, “Community Legacy,” a collaboration with the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, “Slideshow,” co-presented by HUBweek and Now+There, Boston, MA, and “Pack Our Bags,” an interactive installation recently exhibited by For Freedoms at the International Center of Photography, New York, NY.  Hamilton’s current project is “Jukebox,” a community centered public art project for the Cambridge Foundry, Cambridge, MA.

Panel 3 Speakers: Counter-mapping Providence (and Tulsa)

Dwayne Keys has spent over 15 years advocating on behalf of historically excluded and disadvantaged communities. Dwayne serves as Chairperson of the South Providence Neighborhood Association (SPNA), leading efforts to provide public forums where all South Providence residents may have direct input in the urban planning decisions that shape the future of the neighborhood. He also ran for State Representative in the RI General Assembly in 2018. In addition to his advocacy and volunteer work, Dwayne is a full-time Financial Coach with Compass Working Capital, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing financial coaching and education to families and low-incomes residents to help them build assets and financial capabilities. With over 15 years of experience working in banking and financial services before joining Compass, Dwayne still participates in various personal finance programs amd economic prosperity events geared to eliminating poverty.

Marta Martinez founded the Hispanic Heritage Committee of RI (HHCRI) in 1988 and served as the Chair until 2013, when she was hired as Executive Director of the organization (now Rhode Island Latino Arts).  In August 2014, Marta published a book entitled Latino History of RI: Nuestras Raíces, based on her work with the Latino Oral History Project of RI. In 2004-2005, she was Coordinator/Developer of Coming to Rhode Island – Dominican Gallery, an exhibition featuring Fefa’s Market based on the history of Dominicans in Rhode Island at The Providence Children’s Museum in Providence. In 2003-2004, she was also Coordinator/Co-Curator of Conexiones a Traves del Tiempo, an exhibition on Latino history of Rhode Island in the gallery of The Rhode Island Foundation. She continues to promote the importance of collecting history as a way to enhance self pride and a sense of place by offering workshops to young people on the art of collecting oral histories, pairing them with elders and individuals who have a story to tell.  Currently, in collaboration with the Providence Preservation Society, Marta is working on a project funded by the National Trust, “Exploring Places of Significance to Rhode Island’s Latino Communities.”

Aaron Forrest is Associate Professor of Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design, as well as principal of Ultramoderne, an architecture design and research practice based in Providence, RI, which he leads with his partner, Yasmin Vobis. Prior to RISD, Aaron taught studios at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. He has extensive professional experience, having practiced in New York with Bernheimer Architecture and Guy Nordenson and Associates Structural Engineers, and in Madrid with Ábalos & Herreros Arquitectos.

Pegah Rahmanian is the Director of the Unity Center at Rhode Island College and was formerly the Executive Director of Youth in Action. Originally from Yellow Springs, Ohio her work and heart have taken her to Chicago, New Orleans, Oakland, and now Providence. While making her way across the country, she has had the opportunity to develop and grow a youth-led HIV Prevention Program, instituted citywide and institution wide programming on gender, race, class, and sexuality; guided youth steering committees to design community schools, pioneered digital media arts programs, and has taken over 300 urban youth outdoors, backpacking and camping. Pegah holds a B.A. from Oberlin College in Anthropology, Comparative American Studies, and Gender and Women Studies; and a M.A. from Wright State University in Sociology.

Alicia Odewale is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa. She specializes in African Diaspora archaeology in the Caribbean and Southeastern United States. Since 2014 she has been researching archaeological sites related to Afro-Caribbean heritage on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands but continues to research sites of African heritage in Oklahoma, Virginia, Arkansas, and Mississippi. As a Tulsa native, her new project seeks to reanalyze historical evidence from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, use mapping technology to visualize the impact of the massacre and the changing landscape of the historic Greenwood district, and launch new archaeological investigations, utilizing a slow community-based approach. This collaborative project to map historical trauma in Tulsa from 1921-2021, sponsored by the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission will provide pathways toward reconciliation by slowly working alongside the community to find answers to questions still lingering after 100 years.
 Odewale’s research interests include the archaeology of enslavement and freedom in urban contexts, Caribbean archaeology, rural and urban comparative analyses, community-based archaeology, and investigations into different forms of cultural resistance. In addition to her role as faculty, she also serves as the director of the Historical Archaeology and Heritage Studies Laboratory at TU and serves as the co-creator of the Estate Little Princess Archaeological Field School in St. Croix that trains local students in archaeological methods and other STEM related skills for free.