Mapping Prejudice: The Map Library as a Hub for Community Co-Creation and Social Change

Abstract

The John R. Borchert Map Library was the ideal incubator for an experiment that has changed how a wide range of people are thinking about structural racism and the history of race in American urban environments. Mapping Prejudice used a cartographic visualization of racial covenants as the intellectual nexus of a project that transcended disciplinary boundaries and invited community members into cutting-edge research work. The Map Library provided the physical space, resources, and geospatial expertise necessary for community-driven mapping work. It also served as an intersectional hub necessary for this transformative research initiative, illustrating the synergies between map librarianship and other disciplines. The work depended on the unique contributions of the map librarian: project management; experience networking with researchers, campus departments, and community groups; and knowledge of best practices surrounding data management, curation, and reuse. This article explains how Mapping Prejudice changed academic scholarship and public understandings by engaging volunteers in meaningful research. It concludes by providing a description of future directions for this project and calls on librarians to lead more work of this kind. The example of Mapping Prejudice suggests ways that map librarians can be leading new modes of inclusive, equitable and community-responsive research.

Keywords:

• Critical GIS
• critical cartography
• public history
• Minneapolis
• digital humanities
• academic libraries
• map libraries
• racial covenants
• structural racism
• community co-creation
• decolonization
• transdisciplinary research
• crowdsourcing

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities under Grant HAA-271653-20; and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation under Grant 2103-10353.