Maps, anti-racism, and the documentation of racist and right-wing violence in Germany

June 6, 2024 | 1:00-2:30 pm | Room 115b +  online | Gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät | Rudolfskai 42 | Salzburg
Speaker: Mert Pekşen, Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, Osnabrück University, Germany 

This talk explores the relationship between maps, racist and right-wing violence, and anti-racist collective activism in the context of German migration society. Geographers have explored the central role of cartographic practices in (re)producing and reinforcing racial categories and hierarchies. Moreover, situated in multiple critical mapping approaches and traditions such as critical cartography, feminist GIS, queer mapping, and indigenous cartographies, scholars have analyzed the productive potential of spatial and cartographic representations for social justice. A variety of critical GIS and cartography projects have addressed racial inequalities and documented, translated, and visualized experiences of racist violence. Within this broader context and drawing on qualitative data collected through twenty-five interviews with activist initiatives and counseling centers, this talk will focus on the practices of defining, categorizing, and mapping right-wing and racist violence against refugees, migrants, and marginalized people in the German context. Maps and community practices of mapping play a key role in their activist engagements and in the production of knowledge about racist and right-wing violence. In addition to framing maps as collective local and nationwide solidarity tools for making certain forms of violence legible and thus creating claims for accountability, this talk will also show how maps function as collective (digital) sites of memory and archives of the present, recording ongoing violence live and connecting the past to the present.

Mert Pekşen is a social geographer currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Geography (IfG) and the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York in June 2021 with a dissertation on the reconfiguration and rescaling of borders and bordering practices in Turkey. His current research interests include race and (anti-)racism, urban change and migration, solidarity cities, as well as the geographies and practices of memory and critical cartography. He is a researcher in the project RäuMig (Räume der Migrationsgesellschaft / Spaces of Migration Society) and coordinates a study group on “Race, Place and Politics” at IMIS.