This event is co-sponsored by Film and Digital Media

Maps always sense and often cut. Much has been written about their violence, as an overture for the genocidal touch, as a prospecting tool priming landscapes for material and narrative extraction, or as an instrument of attritional social neglect (Lo Presti). Hegemonic cartographies live off of elisions of “disposable bodies” and on demarcation lines which construct architectures of harm (Lambert). This talk focuses instead on scars, gasps of pain, cartographic story-sharing, and maps of hurt. It is thus an homage to marginalized but not marginal bodies, stories and breaths, all demanding oxygen, care, delight, and a “right to co-existence” (Holmes). Drawing on the work of feminist, diasporic, and critical race thinkers, architects, poets, human geographers, and Indigenous Arctic mixmedia practitioners—Katherine McKittrick, Olga Lehmann, Pia Arke, Afaa Weaver, Laura Lo Presti, Johnny Pitts, Eliane Brum, Viktorija Bogdanova, among many others—Musiol will center on site-specific cartographic acts of “tender narration” involving artivists, architects, mappers, students, and literary scholars working together in art galleries, on the page, in our classrooms, and in the streets (Tokarczuk). Specifically, she will meander across several sites and rehearsals of remapping: Afaa Weavers’s and Viktorija Bogdanova’s poetic maps of spaces that “hurt us” and Sissel Bergh’s textual cartographies of South Sámi coast; monumental, yet ephemeral urban-scale poetic storytelling actions taking over the streets, pages, bodies, and facades in Trondheim and Hiedanranta; and, finally, site-specific pedagogies of cartographic story-sharing, which draw on the ambulatory, resuscitative, biosocial oxygen-delivery affordances of poetry (in polylingual urban poetic ensembles and Søstrene Suse’s Radiokino listening seances). The talk will conclude with reflection about the cartographic acts of “repair,” tenderness, and “unlearning” (Azoulay), asking, after Josie Billington and Pia Arke, how we, literary and cultural scholars and students, can attend to the wounded bodies and landscapes “personally,” using our meager disciplinary tools and “enfleshed” cartographies of hurt (Sharpe).

Hanna Musiol (PhD, Northeastern University) is Professor of Modern/Contemporary Literature at NTNU (Norway) and a 2022–2023 Human Rights Fellow at SUNY Binghamton (US). Her research interests include transnational literary studies, site-specific transmedia storytelling and reparative reading practices, and critical theory, with emphasis on migration, environmental humanities / political ecology, and environmental and human rights. She publishes frequently on aesthetics and justice, and her work has appeared in DHQ, ASAP/J, Environment, Space, and Place, Technology of Human Rights Representation, Journal of American Studies, and Writing Beyond the State. Musiol regularly co-organizes city-scale curatorial, public humanities, and civic-engagement initiatives and exhibitions, such as Narrating the City, Of Borders and Travelers, Spectral Landscapes, and Resist as Forest. She is based in Trondheim, where she frequently collaborates with grassroots urban storytelling initiatives such as Literature for Inclusion & Poetry without Borders. She is currently involved in several transborder research projects devoted to spatial storytelling: Narrating Sustainability, One by Walking, Environmental Storytelling, and Environmental Practices Across Borders.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.

RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.